Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Military thinkers: for a bright American future, look to sustainability and liberalism
– Renewable Energy Can Power the World, Says Landmark IPCC Study
– Taboo Economics
– ‘The Ecological Rift’: a radical response to capitalism’s war on the planet (book review)
– Poet Wendell Berry on Mankind’s Ecological Imprint
With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether biologist Ernst Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.
It’s not resource depletion, peak oil, climate change, rising population, corporatocracy or environmental devastation that will be the cause of our demise. Nor is the problem a political stalemate or the stranded costs of our investments in useless, outmoded or destructive technology. These are the not the problems, really: they are the symptoms. Our callousness plays a causal role here, empowering all of these immanent threats to humanity. Change that and we start to change everything.
The beauty of the natural world is a sublime enjoyment we got for free, and this made the pleasure from having possessions pale by comparison. We decided never to let things become our masters. We began to comprehend the great age of the earth, evident every time we walked on rocks or ocean shore, and this made us see the insignificance of our lives. But we were content.
When one of us had a life-threatening illness, remembering our years on the road, mentally reliving the exciting things we did and the inspiring landscapes we saw, gave a comfort nothing else could have given. We are a part of the great and endless circle of life, nothing more, but nothing less.
– Sharing and caring: the implications of collaborative consumption
– Going Local: Across the U.S., Communities Are Forming “Transition Towns”
– “Happy” – the movie
– Documentry “EARTH: The Operators’ Manual” now online and on PBS (video)
-On Small Farms, Hoof Power Returns
-Bringing Sustainability Home
-Upcycling: 2011’s greenest decorating trend
-Brixton Windmill reopens after restoration
-EU unveils plans to pay fishermen to catch plastic
-National Trust’s Wimpole Home Farm seeks online farmers
All empires are threatened by real joy. The empire does not want to change, it wants to hold on to its power, its monolithic marketplaces. It is terrified to experience its own ugliness and lack of heart, its human vulnerability.
– Wendell Berry, Tim DeChristopher, and Teri Blanton discuss principled activism
– Bristol burns once more in protests against new Tesco supermarket
– Watch out! You’re leading a movement!
We must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too likely risk the lives of places and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification ever for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it.
-The Lost World
-Peak Psychotherapy, Abundant Human Connection
-Delivering Educational Products: The Job Formerly Known as Teaching
-A National Security Strategy That Doesn’t Focus on Threats
Last week’s post suggested that any serious response to the predicament of industrial society has to start with using a good deal less energy and resources. The conventional wisdom in response to that suggestion is to insist that if person A doesn’t use a given resource, person B will, so person A might as well get his snout in the trough with everyone else. Plausible though this sounds, it misses one of the core issues at stake: what happens to those who are dependent on the trough when the trough runs dry?
I read yesterday that “a Sri Lankan scientist is calling for the drafting of “Millennium Consumption Goals” to [help] rich countries to curb their climate-damaging consumption habits, in the same way the poor have Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to get them out of poverty.” A fantastic idea—but what would these MCGs include?
