Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kurt Cobb Acceleration is a common theme in contemporary culture and generally tinged with the connotation of “progress.” But acceleration shows itself to be a two-edged sword when applied to the alarming trends in our climate.
Just when you think the last boomlet for geoengineering the climate has expended itself and we might be rid of any serious consideration of it as a strategy for addressing climate change, it rises zombie-like from the dead and starts roaming the Earth again.
The dense worldwide transportation network constructed by humans is now powering so-called variants (mutations) of COVID-19 across the world from their countries of origin. The British variant (called B.1.1.7), the Brazilian variant (called P.1) and the South African variant (called B.1.351) are all racing across the globe.
We pandemic-weary humans are ready to be done with COVID-19. But apparently, it is not done with us
The zeal of the media for a return to life as it was in 2019 is a form of instant nostalgia. Nostalgia is longing for an idealized time in the past that never actually was.
Chris Smaje’s book, “A Small Farm Future,” is a valuable contribution to envisioning the path to a sustainable future.
Three leading cities – London, Paris and New York – have all seized on the Covid-19 pandemic as an opportunity to make improvements to their cycling infrastructure to improve mobility, reduce congestion and cut pollution. While these cities are distinct, how do their cycling infrastructures compare?
Recently, we Earthlings have been seeing amazing images from the surface of Mars courtesy of NASA’s Perseverance rover. Meanwhile, here on planet Earth, much of the high-tech production system that helped to produce the rover is in a spot of trouble.
When someone says that humans are on a course to extinction, it elicits a yawn from most people. Epidemiologist Shanna Swan has projected the date it will begin and can tell you exactly why
The news is full of stories about a system whose rivets are about to pop en masse. Disparate calamities are arising out of a system that applies certain “principles” across sectors of society. Those principles have their origin in rigid economic ideology. Let us take Texas utility customers who shivered through rolling electricity blackouts last week.
If you are trying to prove something is true and certain facts get in the way, it’s almost always useful to exclude them. This is apparently what technology cheerleader Andrew McAfee has done in his recent book “More from Less,” which claims that advanced economies have been dematerializing for something like the last 40 years.
A society knits itself together through the stories it tells itself. A rigid uniformity in those stories leads to stagnation and a suffocating of creativity and needed change in society. However, if the stories are too divergent, we will be unable to find common ground.
