Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The different speakers in the Sacred Earth series are deeply active and involved in addressing many of these issues and thus have an important message to share regarding the way that their culture, and indigenous culture in general, play a key role in generating solutions to environmental collapse.
Michael Charles Tobias and Jane Gray Morrison have, once again, broken through into a new realm of environmental research with their latest mind-bending work, The Quantum Biosemiosphere.
And, to complete the circle, neither racial justice nor health justice nor environmental justice nor climate justice can be fully secured without turning the existing economy inside out, dedicating it to meeting society’s needs, not feeding the net worth of the plutocrats.
Deforestation is on the rise in megadiverse Colombia. Attempting to understand the complex and interconnected web of social, political, economic and environmental drivers of deforestation in Colombia – past and present, legal and illicit, direct and indirect – is critical.
The goal of this essay is to reignite a conversation with the Post Carbon Institute’s own Richard Heinberg about music and change in planetary systems, a conversation which began in the fall of 2017. I’m captioning this second stage of the conversation “What’s musical about biology and why does that matter?”
The logical endpoint then is to leverage the word cataclysm in these times, because only that word captures the magnitude with which our species is fundamentally altering the world in ways that will have profound, lasting, and potentially fatal impacts for humanity as a whole.
Many transitions in human cultures are marked by rites of passage, such as baptisms, weddings, even funerals. And, during those transitions there is a moment when those involved are neither what they were, nor what they will become.
The coronavirus may not, in retrospect, prove to be the tipping point that upends human civilization as we know it, but it should serve as a warning that we will experience ever more such events in the future as the world heats up.
The coronavirus pandemic is like a chunk of ice falling off of a melting glacier. You can see the ice falling, but you can’t see the melting of the whole glacier. Similarly, climate change will keep dropping chunks of ice at humanity well after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.
If ever there were a time to reassess the genuine threats to our security and separate them from the self-interested aims of the weapons industry, this is it.
Yet our governments’ primary effort is to enhance their power at the expense of other countries. In failing to address our real and common threats, we are our own adversaries.
To return to the pre-coronavirus assumptions about the world is to return to a way of thinking and living that cannot be sustained and that will destroy the planet. We need to reinvent modern civilization and we need colleges and universities to take on a leadership role in this great task.
This crisis must be an opportunity to challenge what we have allowed corporations around the world to do with the natural environment (conveniently referred to as resources) and people (labour) in the name of economic growth. Thatcher was wrong: there are alternatives.
