Sustainability can (and must) be beautiful
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.
Sustainability
Standing Marx on his head: Rethinking socialism and sustainability
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.
The Art of the Legal Hack, as Pioneered by Janelle Orsi
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.
George Monbiot’s Out of the Wreckage; A friendly critique
Few have made a more commendable contribution to saving the planet than George Monbiot. His recent book, Out of the Wreckage, continues the effort and puts forward many important ideas…but I believe there are problems with his diagnosis and his remedy. … the main goal is not a town containing nice things like community orchards, nor indeed one with robust community, but a town we run on principles of frugal, cooperative, needs-focused, local self-sufficiency.
Beyond Sustainability? — We are Living in the Century of Regeneration
The term regenerative development, on the other hand, carries within it a clear aim of regenerating the health and vitality of the nested, scale-linking systems we participate in. At a basic level regeneration also communicates not to use resources that cannot be regenerated, nor to use any resources faster than they can be regenerated.
Human well-being, economic growth and so-called decoupling
Some people claim that humans—called breatharians—can live on air alone. Others claim we can have economic growth without increasing our resource use, so-called decoupling. Neither claim withstands scrutiny though here I am only going to deal with the second one.
Can we create a durable future?
Our contemporary world is designed for impermanence — which also makes it resource- and energy-intensive as we invent, disseminate and discard a sea of gadgets, tear down and build an endless array of buildings, and junk and manufacture vehicles in an ever-repeating cycle. If we want to build a durable culture, we will have to slow down and rescale our lives and the life of our societies. But what would the outlines of such a culture look like?
3 Things We Learned About the Sustainability Movement at Future Earth
Future Earth is an open, international network of academic research projects focused on transition to a sustainable world. It’s an umbrella organization formed in 2015 to support these projects, foster collaboration between them, and serve as a bridge between the research community and the outside world for 10 years.
Sustainability 4.0
Sustainability 4.0 implies the empowered co-creation of prosumers in order to re-shape economy and society towards social inclusiveness and ecological soundness.
Leaving our “Extractivist” past behind is about survival
Naomi Klein: “We are told that selfishness and short-sightedness is part of human nature, which prevents us acting. This is not true and it steers us away from an analysis of our [capitalist] system. In fact, the fight for survival is human nature.”
Corruption, resources, climate and systemic risk
Corruption like that revealed in the Panama Papers pales in comparison to the kind that threatens to undermine the very material underpinnings of our society.
A critique of Leigh Phillips’ assertion of the Tech-Fix Ecomodernist faith
“Ecomodernism” assumes that by accelerating modern technologies economic growth can continue and high living standards can be achieved for all, while resource and ecological problems are solved.