Can we save the world without free will?

Many articles on environmental topics are secular homilies, bristling with shoulds and shouldn’ts. Don’t use a gasoline-powered leaf blower. Buy an electric car instead of a gas-powered car. … If you don’t behave right, we will all go to climate hell. But what if we humans actually don’t have free will—the ability to act without constraints of circumstances, necessity, or fate? Is it possible to organize mass behavioral change in its absence?

The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World

Now Andreas Malm, who won the prestigious Deutscher Memorial Prize for his 2015 book Fossil Capital, has written a powerful essay “to scrutinize some of the theories circulating at the nature/society junction in the light of climate change.” In clear and convincing prose, he shows that the “end of nature” thesis stems from deep confusion about the complex relationship between human society and the rest of nature.

The practice of anarchy

Whenever an existing hierarchically organized system becomes sufficiently ossified and dysfunctional to give an obvious edge to an improvised, anarchic, perhaps initially inferior alternative, there is a possibility that such an alternative will materialize out of nowhere, spread virally, become dominant, and then, in turn, become hierarchical and ossified.

Resilience: Why so many parents today are getting it wrong

I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read about the importance of developing resilience.  It’s mentioned all over the web and for good reason, as it’s a critical coping mechanism.  Most of those articles however, are directed at developing resilience within the adult population.  Seldom, do we talk about how parents can and should create resilience in children, particularly when there are many parents out there who are doing the exact opposite of what’s required.
 

Gay, gay, marrions-les

France is about to legalize gay marriage. This has caused some turmoil in some part of the opinion and the right wing opposition bitterly opposes it, mostly, I think, to show they are indeed the Opposition. Indeed, the very fact that a measure which concerns only 5% of the population has become, in the middle of a major economic crisis, one of the focuses of our collective conversation tells a lot about how impotent our rulers have become.

deconstructing the beast

We like to think, as Transitioners, we are classless, but we are not…We are constructed socially to fit into tiers. No matter what class we are born into, there are always people above us and people below us. And every transaction we make or thought we have is tempered by our conditioning: to keep ourselves on that rung, or climb the ladder, and for that we have to push others down. Them, Her, that district, those people.