Next big steps on climate
My big hope is for progressives to leave behind their issue silos, come together, and forge a mighty political force, both for immediate action and for deep, transformative change.
Environment featured
MM #15: What Now?
You can recognize that modernity does not pursue appropriate goals, and look forward to a changed world. That attitude shift alone will make you a driving force for a changing world. And that doesn’t sound too hard, does it? You can start today!
Tir the story of the Welsh landscape: Excerpt
And though this remains true for farmers and shepherds in areas like the Carneddau today, this need-to-know and name-your-environment according to its natural features and function within the rural economy held much more broadly across pre-industrial Wales.
Hurricane Exxon? Hurricane Ted Cruz?
For decades, fossil fuel propagandists have tried to weasel out of responsibility for climate change by blaming their customers, ordinary people like Debbie and Ernesto. The hurricane names reinforce that narrative. Let’s change it.
Taking the long view: building environmental activism in the next generation
If we expect the next generation to do better than the present one at protecting our precious blue marble, however, we have an obligation to help them as much as possible.
Okeechobee County: Kept Great with Conservation
Wetland restoration and conservation, in combination with agricultural stakeholder best management practices, is a promising model for success.
MM #13: A Species out of Context
You see, as we foolishly escaped our ecological context, we recklessly re-fashioned the world so that we are destroying the ecological context crucial to millions of other species—including ourselves, eventually.
Review: The Burning World by J. G. Ballard
For all its bleakness, The Burning World offers a more hopeful outlook on humanity’s future than does The Drowned World. While the latter leaves no room for hope that human extinction can be averted, the former hints at the possibility of recovery and renewal for humanity.
What Could A Climate Corps Do? Part 2
Living machines are essentially intensive, indoor artificial wetlands. Technical names for living machines include “advanced ecologically engineered systems” and “fixed-film ecology wastewater treatment systems.” What they entail is mimicking natural processes of biological decomposition in a constructed aquatic environment.
Dark oxygen: We don’t know what we don’t know
The discovery of oxygen production in the deep ocean without light (and therefore without photosynthesis) is upending ideas about the evolution of life and origins of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Rural ‘buffer ring’ can reduce urban heat island effect by more than 0.5C
Rural land cover surrounding a city has the potential to reduce the “urban heat island” (UHI) effect and cool the city centre by more than 0.5C, new research shows.
Between Optimism and Despair: The Messy Middle Paths Through Climate Breakdown
In the escalating drama of climate breakdown — especially as we navigate the apparent crossing of the 1.5C warming threshold — a binary is emerging that wastes a huge amount of time, energy and passion, needlessly limiting our vision to confront and adapt to our situation at all levels of society: Are we (optimist) solutionists or (realist) doomers?