Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
#BristolFoodKind is a campaign to create a community of acts of kindness through food during the lockdown. This community is sharing practical ideas about how you can buy food, reduce waste and grow from home, in a way that is considerate to yourself and your community at a time of crisis.
As in every transition, in this time we are witnessing structures collapse, both mental and institutional, and the subsequent state of crisis and negotiation that this entails. Yet the bardo brings with it a valuable promise: the ability to re-create the relationship we have with ourselves and with the world.
In a genuinely tragic and terrifying moment like this one, there is little room for romantic notions of a simpler, slower life. There is nothing particularly romantic about hunkering down. The term denotes a crouching close to the ground while applying oneself to a task.
Having been shaken to our collective core by the COVID19 pandemic, can we muster the will to make major changes in how we rebuild our systems, to truly transform how we function as a society for the betterment of Earth and her inhabitants? What cause is more just, fair, and wise?
The environment, health and economic development are intertwined. What’s happening in remote villages on a Southeast Asian island holds lessons for how all nations can better prepare for the next global shock.
So, will the apparition at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel actually represent an oncoming train that heralds the re-establishment of the globalised industrial model? Or might it be the beginnings of a renaissance of food systems which truly serve the public interest?
Any tool or circumstance that enables Indigenous people to fortify their traditions, territories and practices, while carrying them into the next generations, will be of great benefit to the global community. The COVID-19 pandemic may just give the proper pretext to support this important process globally.
Amidst the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, California’s Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM), whose stated mission is to “prioritize protecting public health, safety, and the environment in its oversight of the oil, natural gas, and geothermal industries” paradoxically issued 24 new fracking permits on April 3rd, authorizing the first new oil wells using hydraulic fracking in California since July of last year.
If the pandemic extends into the next harvest, farmers like Piro may be forced to focus on maximizing yield at the expense of innovation, quality, and conservation. The long-term consequences are not just for our palates or our pockets, but for the environment.
Increases in GDP and CO2 over the past three decades have had one easily identifiable cause in common: the reluctance of governments to curb the carbon emissions of the world’s largest economies for fear of slowing the growth of their own GDP.
This shock to the transport system has come as a result of a global pandemic, despite consistent and increasingly urgent calls for change in the face of climate change. It took a more immediate public health threat to give governments the power to declare national emergencies and to restrict movement and other individual freedoms.
The point that must be recognized and discussed, that begs our attention, is the fact that “normal” was killing us.
Most of our politicians and the for-profit media portray the economic disaster we are currently facing as strictly Covid-caused. It’s not.
