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Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
One can write off the decline of higher education as simply one more aspect of the global chaos in which we are now living. Except that the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order.
The content of “On The Future of Food” (a speech given in May of 2011 by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales at Georgetown University and recently published by Rodale Press) shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with the Prince or sustainable agriculture. The two have been connected since at least 1985, when HRH converted his farmland to organic, wildlife-friendly practices…That he is so personally knowledgeable on the subject—as well as being in a position to influence discourse and policy at such a high level—gives him some clout to tell us what is wrong in the food system and what can be done about it.
In recent years African countries have enjoyed interest from abroad, thanks in part to a great amount of available land apparently ideal for cultivating crops for providing food security and for the production of biofuels. However, insufficient legal protection for the local population often leads to the signing of contracts that deprive these people of their source of subsistence…And if the locals are in fact consulted at all on the matter, they can typically count on a campaign of misinformation from the government.
I don’t think climate change necessitates a social revolution. This idea is coming from the right-wing think tanks and not scientific organizations. They’re ideological organizations. Their core reason for being is to defend what they call free-market ideology. They feel that any government intervention leads us to serfdom and brings about a socialist world, so that’s what they have to fight off: a socialist world.
For the last several years I’ve been working on the invention of “Urban and Suburban Right-to-Farm Laws” and have had some notable successes including a legal conference on the idea and a few municipalities that have implemented them. This is one of the reasons I think this is so incredibly important – zoning presumptions simply can’t be allowed to prevent people from using less and meeting their own needs.
Neoclassical economists, having worked hard to convince the world that everything was hunky-dory circa 2005, and concurrently having invented the rationales and the theories behind the financial time bombs that went off across the landscape, don’t seem to have suffered one whit for the subsequent sequence of events, a slow-motion train wreck that one might reasonably have expected would have rubbished the credibility of lesser mortals.
Dr. John Mashey investigates the right-wing billionaires & corporations who pay alleged “charities”, bloggers, and old weathermen to deny climate science. Then Canadian journalist Margaret Munro on government muzzling scientists, plus an update from Union of Concerned Scientists Francesca Grifo on science freedom in U.S.
In the case of Occupy it has changed the political rules of engagement, for the moment. But we’re still at the early stages of an eighty-year economic crisis and a forty-year political crisis. Such crises can take a decade or more to unfold. For now, Occupy has opened up some possibilities.
In New York State, some 82 towns and counties have passed ordinances outlawing fracking, a natural gas drilling method known for causing severe water pollution. Another 35 have ordinances in the works. But until last week, no one knew quite what would happen when those ordinances were—inevitably—challenged by drilling companies.
Now, in a resounding win for activists, two different state Supreme Court justices have upheld fracking bans in two different New York towns.
Parts 5 and 6 of Fleeing Vesuvius are entitled “Changing the Way We Live” and “Changing the Way We Think.” Both are about solutions. They propose broad strategies for supporting large numbers of people in downsizing their energy guzzling way of life.
On September 15, 2011, at over 60 locations worldwide, people handed out their own money to complete strangers, two coins or notes at a time, asking recipients to pass half on to someone else. Here are our reflections on the event, including why and how it happened.
Those frightening sounds, sights, and odors on the wind this foreboding snowless winter — like emanations from some back ward of a global psychiatric hospital — are the signs of a nation going completely mad. The traumatic rise of oil prices above the $100 level is one irritant, prompting a range of people-who-oughta-know-better to gibber and fulminate as though they’d been locked in the nation’s attic since Thanksgiving with nothing to do but play with a box of pencils. Meanwhile, several absurd “narratives” circulate around the mainstream media that are sure to cause this country more trouble — as any set of pernicious untruths will.
