By Erik Assadourian, Gaianism
2020 was a year lived in fear—fear of the surprise arrival of a novel coronavirus, of not understanding it, of getting it, of watching a loved one get it—never being sure if they’d survive.
By Brian Davey, Credo Economics
Few books have had the scale of impact on me as this one. It took me 5 days to read and revealed a world that was completely unexpected and quite new. Zuboff is aware that what she writes is about something novel and unprecedented. It is unlike what has gone before. That is what makes us vulnerable.
By Kara Stiff, Low-Carbon Life
The stuff we humans buy is a disaster for the planet we love. Livestock intended for human food now make up 60% of the total weight of mammals on Earth, while wild mammals make up only 4% (the rest is humans and pets). The global clothing industry is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the emissions from entire European Union. Single-use plastics are choking the oceans. Transportation (including the cars we drive, but the semis that cart our products to stores) accounts for almost a third of U.S. emissions.
By Peter Doran, Open Democracy
The questions posed by the ecological crises – notably the climate emergency - are a series of provocations. These questions drive us back not only to intimate connections between our actions and the fate of the earth and our atmosphere, but to the intimate realm of our attention and capacity to care both individually and collectively.
By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian blog
Human beings are at their worst when they are consumers, locked into the miserable pursuit of satisfaction through the isolation of individual consumption – particularly when that shopping and consuming is done online (and when, as with Instagram, we learn to turn ourselves into commodities). T
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
In the past, we did not need to make a big deal of enough; it was built into our lives in many ways. Our language recognised it in phrases like ‘enough is as good as a feast’, and ‘waste not, want not’. But in modern life the sense of enough is badly underdeveloped; in affluent societies we have largely forgotten the wisdom captured in the old sayings.
By Jody Tishmack, Anima/Soul
The older I get the less I enjoy having stuff. When we moved three years ago it was shocking to find how much stuff we had accumulated, and how much work it took to pack and move it.
By Anja Lyngbaek, Local Futures
Rampant consumerism doesn’t happen by itself: it is encouraged by an economic system that requires perpetual economic growth. When national economies show signs of slowing down, citizens are invariably called upon to increase their consumption
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
So much of modern culture insists that constant stimulation is the essence of living. In truth, constant stimulation is merely a tactic of advertisers, app makers, websites and myriad media outlets to hook you on their messages and their products. Leisure requires withdrawal from all that and—this is the key point—learning to derive pleasure from solitude, quiet observation of the world around us and introspection.
By Rob Dietz, Resilience.org
The truth is that Jim made a practical choice. He had bought something he could afford. He wasn’t a pretentious jerk, a privileged snob, a hyper-critical college know-it-all, or a buffoon with delusions of grandeur. He was a hard worker who needed reliable transportation to get to and from work.
By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning
Imagine a world where corporate charters were only granted if they adopted a triple bottom line, and where shareholder lawsuits threatened every time a company broke one of its own social and environmental standards. Until that happens, it may be that the “worst event in the history of our civilization” is not the future development of modern AI, but the decision by a group of 17thcentury politicians to unleash the power of the Corporation on an unsuspecting humanity.
By Michelle Galimba, Anima/Soul
My daughter, being sixteen, just got her driver’s license. I asked her a question a few days ago: ” If you had to choose one and give up the other, which would you choose: a personal vehicle or the internet (including social media, wifi, smart phones, etc.)?” She thought for a bit and said: “It’s a hard question but I would choose the internet. Nobody actually likes driving, it’s just something we have to do, but I really like having access to movies at home and all that other stuff.” She is just one young person, but the choice and the distinction that she made surprised me.