Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We ought to be demanding that Public Health England and the devolved administrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast revise the Eatwell Guide, our national healthy eating guidelines, around sustainable diets, combining health, environment and social criteria such as affordability. These are what should drive production and determine rationing, if circumstances deteriorate.
So…. imagine trillions of dollars to craft and curate a sustainable future that overhauls our economic system into a vibrant and energetic web, providing a hopeful and healthy vision of tomorrow.
Who gets to imagine our future? Let’s make sure this vision is led by our powerful and vital actions and imaginations.
Hard planetary boundaries and fraught ecosystem requirements do exist. Yet love exists too, and everywhere, amidst the imperatives of risk and survival.
Let’s create a living open source project—where collective intelligence informs near and intermediate term mitigation, one that helps us as a culture navigate the narrow path between fantasy and doom. When we see gasoline this summer under $1 per gallon let’s not waste that moment in a Caligula-like orgy of consuming like we used to, but rather, reflect, imagine, and resolve to make America good again.
Will future generations look back on the coronavirus pandemic as a blip or a game changer? Let’s review a few of the major trends that developed during the Anthropocene and engage in a little informed speculation about how they might be affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.
The true value of the internet is being revealed in the public response to the coronavirus pandemic. In bringing people together and keeping them informed, the internet and digital culture in general are doing things few or probably none of their detractors could do.
Coronavirus is both a symptom of the problematic globalized economy and an important signal that things need to change. Emergency short-term measures to contain the virus also have a positive impact on decimated global ecosystems.
When an economy contracts involuntarily, that is called a recession or, if it lasts long enough, a depression. Nobody advocates for such unplanned economic contraction because that has all sorts of negative social effects, including rising unemployment, stress, and poverty. So we must never confuse degrowth with recession.
The ways that nations respond to the pandemic today will largely determine their fortunes and fates over the next couple of decades at least, and perhaps beyond.
The global oil price has crashed, mainly as a result of the coronavirus (COVID-19), and earlier in the week hit lows not seen for two decades, of around $20 a barrel for WTI and $24 for Brent crude.
In times of crisis, especially in urban situations, a lot of the usual individualist concerns drop away and people create ingenious new commons to get by, ‘paradises built in hell’ in the resonant phrase of Rebecca Solnit. But I’d argue the longer and larger task is to dwell less on this transient commoning and focus instead on building the conditions in which people can create their own livelihoods renewably and locally as individuals-in-communities.
One of the organisms that make up Gaia, thanks to a mutation, has converted into a pandemic that is putting it at serious risk. The coronaviruses of Gaia are anthropocentrism, capitalism, and technocracy. Therefore, we need to banish them urgently, taking the draconian measures that are necessary.
