By Luis I. Prádanos, Resilience.org
I believe that higher education would better serve students in particular and all humans in general if our teaching and research methods stop perpetuating the cultural paradigm that brought us to the brink of extinction and start encouraging students to imagine and create alternatives to it.
By Michelle Lim, The Conversation
We are also undermining the capacity of the Earth to sustain thriving human societies. We have the power to change this – but we need to act now.
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
Our imaginations are rooted in the natural world. They formed in the natural world. They took their metaphors and similes from the natural world. It’s from the natural world that we thought that something might be strong as an oak tree or as fragile as a reed.
By Bill Laurance, The Conversation
The bottom line is: we’re changing our world in many different ways at once. And the myriad little creatures that play so many critical roles in the fabric of life are struggling to survive the onslaught.
By Brian Miller, South Roane Agrarian
Today the monarchs are all but gone. That sad fact hit home this week as I read of the 97 percent collapse of the Western monarch population. No number of inspired “Ten Things You Can Do” articles, no amount of milkweed replanting, will revive a species once it falls into the past.
By Alex Kirby, Climate News Network
Today sees the launch of ExtinctionRebellion, which describes itself as an international movement using mass civil disobedience to force governments to enter World War Two-level mobilisation mode, in response to climate breakdown and ecological crisis.
By Elizabeth Boakes, David Redding, The Conversation
Extinction is, after all, inevitable in the natural world - some have even called it the “engine of evolution”. So should extinction matter to us?
By Skya Dietz, Rob Dietz, Resilience.org
On a typical school night, I was relaxing in the living room in front of the TV when my mom told me the last male northern white rhino had died. The news didn’t officially register until I started talking to my dad. When I told him what had happened, I just started crying.
By Ryan Sandford-Blackburn, Permaculture Association
The sudden loss is a sign of ecosystem health, or should that be illness? A warning sign. So, why should we care? Plain and simply, as far as we know, this planet is the grand sum of life in the universe. We have a duty to cherish and nurture it.
By William E. Rees, The Tyee
A curious thing about H. sapiens is that we are clever enough to document — in exquisite detail — various trends that portend the collapse of modern civilization, yet not nearly smart enough to extricate ourselves from our self-induced predicament.
By Robert J. Burrowes, Open Democracy
We might be annihilating life on earth but this is not something about which we have no choice. In fact, each and every one of us has a choice: we can choose to do nothing, we can wait for (or even lobby) others to act, or we can take powerful action ourselves. But unless you search your heart and make a conscious and deliberate choice to commit yourself to act powerfully, your unconscious choice will effectively be the first one
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
So those who claim that Malthusian limits don’t apply to humans are effectively assigning our species the status of permanent evolutionary winners.