Divest and Invest
At the Universtiy of Michigan we are readying our campaign to become more inclusive and strategic.
At the Universtiy of Michigan we are readying our campaign to become more inclusive and strategic.
I have come to question some of the assumptions that underpin mainstream education, and to consider what can be done…to provide an education that is appropriate to the challenges of the 21st century.
What is the transformity of my personal action?
Because of both forces—attacks pushing the university to the right, and faculty complacency—there’s not enough genuine critical thinking going on at UT, at a time in the world when multiple cascading crises—economic and ecological—demand a critical thinking that is tougher than ever.
But what can we pull out of Vincent’s story that might illuminate our discussions about education and learning over this month?
It is time to consider a redesign of the university system in a way that takes advantage of recent Internet technology developments and addresses some of the social and economic problems surrounding higher education.
In Extraenvironmentalist #59 we speak with critical theorist Max Haiven about the financialization of higher education and how it has limited our imagination…Then, we talk to Kio Stark about her recent book Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything
Last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report attempted to raise a question that, as I see it, deserves much more discussion than it gets these days. Most currently popular ways of trying to put pressure on the American political system presuppose that the politicians will pay attention if the people, or the activists who claim to speak in their name, simply make enough noise. The difficulty is that the activists, or for that matter the people, aren’t actually giving the politicians any reason to pay attention; they’re simply making noise, and the politicians have gotten increasingly confident that the noise can be ignored with impunity.
Long gone are the days when the job you’d grow up to do would more or less be determined by the jobs your parents did. But going now is the concept of the “job for life”; something you’d study for in youth and then spend your life improving your skills at, earning more and more pay until you’d retire with a generous final salary pension.
-Why America’s Economic Growth May Be (Shh!) Over, a New Marketplace Podcast
-Living Well: Explorations into the End of Growth
-And now: Peak growth theory
We are not quite out of gas yet in the United States. But we keep steaming down fjords without outlets, turning randomly from one blind alley to the next in trying to adapt to our energy quandary. In Captain Cook’s case, he was exploring with zero information, so there was a good chance of failure. But when it comes to energy alternatives, we can avoid dead ends, since we have what Captain Cook didn’t have, information on the best alternatives. This post is about the science of net energy regarding those options.
The definition of sustainability, like many definitions, depends upon one’s viewpoint. One’s experience and geographic setting heavily influence the way one sees the world. In this paper, we examine sustainability from two distinct locations, a highly urbanized and suburbanized island setting in the global north, and a remote island archipelago in the global south. Both locations have distinct cultural and geographic heritages. Each provides an interesting way to explore the meaning of sustainability within our current era.