Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While coffee chains across North America generate mountains of disposable cups and lids every day, Italy’s traditional café culture offers a different model. By serving coffee in reusable cups and encouraging customers to stay rather than rush away, Italian bars show that convenience and sustainability do not have to be at odds.
Why do people with access to the same facts arrive at radically different conclusions about the future? Physicist Tom Murphy reflects on an impasse with Dave Murphy over modernity, ecological limits and humanity’s place in the living world.
Indigenous communities in South America are raising native bees to help protect the insects, conserve forests, and strengthen their own cultural ties to the ecosystem.
In the concluding installment of this discussion series, Tom Murphy and Dave Murphy wrestle with whether a just energy transition can truly be sustainable, or whether modernity itself is a dead end on a finite planet.
In this installment of an ongoing series, Tom and Dave Murphy explore what “sustainable” truly means and whether any disruption to natural ecosystems or energy flows by humanity is inherently unsustainable.
Can modern civilization survive for the long term within planetary limits? This dialogue pits optimism about renewable energy and human adaptability against a more fundamental critique: that modernity itself may be incompatible with ecological sustainability.
More than a farming method, regenerative agriculture was conceived as an ethic of care for land and life. Focusing on a “one-size-fits-all” standard for regenerative agriculture and marketing it for profits has left the concept a hollowed version of itself.
As the planet strains under endless GDP growth, econometrician Gaya Herrington makes the case for a “wellbeing economy” that trades our obsession with more for a future of enough: redirecting innovation, work and policy toward human flourishing and healthy ecosystems within the Earth’s limits.
Once this sustainability revolution started to take hold, the ‘great sorting’ of deciding what was essential and what was simply voracious desire, reshaped many areas of society. And, so, it was decided to de-commodify food, education and healthcare, in line with a more ecological form of economics, where Nature has a seat at the boardroom table.
To fulfill the vision that sets the practice of sustainability in motion—the vision of life coordinating with life in ways that ensure the flourishing of life—ethics and aesthetics must be reintegrated.
Marx is famous for standing Hegel on his head, arguing that ideas and culture are not the fundamental causes of a society’s form as Hegel claimed, but that it is the productive situation which determines a society’s superstructure of ideas and values. Sorry socialist comrades but he was wrong about that. And it’s important for thinking about revolutionary strategy.
SELC has advised over 1,500 grassroots groups, and when necessary, initiated policy initiatives to try to change laws and regulations that otherwise impede collective ownership and commoning.
