Complexity, cooperation, and civilization

By Jeremy Lent, Resilience.org

Life’s glorious triumph on Earth has been achieved, not just through increased complexity, but also increased cooperation. In fact, the two go hand in hand.

It isn’t nice to block the courtroom…

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

Nobody can possibly say how these complex intersecting crises will pan out. For sure, nobody can say that they’re certain to pan out well.

Public Gardens in the Time of Contagion: An Ark of a Different Sort

By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion

This is a story about the critical role of public gardens and the pandemic-induced recession’s impact on them—as seen through the experiences of the Green Ark Botanical Garden Foundation (Foundation or Ark) in Costa Rica. 

Blood Moon

By Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Resilience.org

Then I found the blood moon eclipsed through the trees, an elemental mystery that reaches deep into our ancestral memories, before our consciousness was obscured by science and reason.

Not Just Energy, but Everything

By Chris Rhodes, Energy Balance

The criticality of the global energy situation is emphasised by the release, on schedule (18-5-21), of the eagerly awaited “Net Zero by 2050” roadmap (NZE) from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Friday essay: searching for sanity in a world hell-bent on destruction

By Samuel Alexander, The Conversation

In an age now widely described as the Anthropocene, the conventionally held distinction between sanity and insanity is at risk of collapsing … and taking our civilisation with it.

Sir David Nails It

By Tom Murphy, Do the Math

Our outsized power as a species bestows on us a grave responsibility to prioritize nature above ourselves, which ironically is the best way to prioritize our own long term happiness on this marvel of a planet.

21st century crimes against nature: ecocide as international law

By Mark Kernan, Resilience.org

Just as genocide has become the norm in international law, it is time to make war on nature a prosecutable crime also.

Mass Education and the Climate Crisis: Lessons from the Pandemic (Part 3)

By Aaron Karp, Resilience.org

The unprecedented drop in emissions resulting from the shutdown reinforces an idea over a decade old yet too infrequently acknowledged—the need for economic contraction in addressing the climate crisis.

Review: Capitalism and Environmental Collapse by Luiz Marques

By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press

Capitalism and Environmental Collapse is an exhaustive summary of today’s plethora of existential ecological threats, followed by an equally comprehensive discussion of what author Luiz Marques deems to be the core fallacies at their root.

Worried about Earth’s future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists can grasp

By Corey J.A. Bradshaw, Daniel T. Blumstein, Paul R. Ehrlich, The Conversation

The research published today reviews more than 150 studies to produce a stark summary of the state of the natural world.

The economic legacy of the Holocene

By Lisi Krall, Resilience.org

We should face reality: The other-than-human-world now has become almost entirely eclipsed by an unassailable “superorganism”—us, the human species—that continues to expand in evermore destructive fashion.