Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Two of the key goals for any Transition Initiative just starting out are to raise awareness about Transition and build a robust base of supporters. When members of Transition groups in the Twin Cities of Minnesota heard about the Northern Spark festival, they knew it was a golden opportunity.
As of one year later, there has been no great purge. Federal data sets related to environmental and climate science are still accessible in the same ways they were before Trump took office. However, in many other instances, federal agencies have tampered with information about climate change.
Water activist Steve Tamar expected just a dozen students to show up to his citizen-science training at Maricao High School in western Puerto Rico this past October. Instead, the sweltering hot auditorium was packed with teenagers looking to help test the island’s water.
The Paris Climate Agreement and several other United Nations (UN) pacts “all depend on the health and vitality of our natural environment in all its diversity and complexity,” said Dr. Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of the UN-backed organization behind the report. “Acting to protect and promote biodiversity is at least as important to achieving these commitments and to human well-being as is the fight against global climate change.”
The days of constructive political debate and compromise in the legislative and executive branches of government are gone, leaving the courts as the primary venues in which the causes and consequences of global climate change are being debated, and stable solutions sought.
Our insistence upon having everything has ironically set us upon a journey toward an era of great loss. Some of what we will have to relinquish is painfully clear already, as we see cities and small nations burn and/or wash away, as we find ourselves increasingly donning masks so as not to die of the very air we must breathe, as we find cesium 137 in our fish, RoundUp in our grains, microplastics in our waters. These are the obvious costs.
This is an abbreviated version of the multimedia “Ecopolis” theatre show performed in the spring of 2016 by author Jeff Biggers and the Awful Purdies musical group in the historic Old Capitol in Iowa City. “Ecopolis” has also been adapted and performed in Chicago, in various cities in Iowa including Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, Cedar Falls, and in Carbondale, Illinois.
The warming the world has already experienced could be enough to melt more than a third of the world’s glaciers outside Antarctica and Greenland – regardless of current efforts to reduce emissions. That is the stark conclusion of a new study, which analyses the lag between global temperature rise and the retreat of glaciers.
The world is becoming increasingly urban and cities face a constant struggle with the complex environmental, social, economic, and political challenges of the 21st century. Many international organizations have argued that cities will need to become more resilient to these challenges. However, it is not particularly clear what that really means.
Imagine a space where climate academics could be truly honest with policy makers about their analysis and conclusions, and where disagreements were discussed openly and constructively. Add to this, vociferous engagement by younger generations, listened to by a new breed of policy makers playing a straighter bat.
Nestled in Galicia’s fertile hills, the commons community of Froxán is engaged in a struggle to protect its territory and history from Spanish miner Sacyr’s plans to re-open the San Finx tungsten mine. The defining feature of Froxán’s resistance has been the community’s decision to counter the advances of mining by working positively for land, culture and the commons with new vigour.
Let’s face it, most of us don’t love the environment most of the time. More often than not, the environment is too cold, too hot, too buggy, too dry or too wet, and we try to keep it safely on the far side of a window or a TV screen. Bicycle travel has a way of breaking us out of that narrow band of comfort.
