Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Many articles on environmental topics are secular homilies, bristling with shoulds and shouldnāts. Donāt use a gasoline-powered leaf blower. Buy an electric car instead of a gas-powered car. … If you donāt behave right, we will all go to climate hell. But what if we humans actually donāt have free willāthe ability to act without constraints of circumstances, necessity, or fate? Is it possible to organize mass behavioral change in its absence?
Now Andreas Malm, who won the prestigious Deutscher Memorial Prize for his 2015 bookĀ Fossil Capital, has written a powerful essay āto scrutinize some of the theories circulating at the nature/society junction in the light of climate change.āĀ In clear and convincing prose, he shows that the āend of natureā thesis stems from deep confusion about the complex relationship between human society and the rest of nature.
A low budget TV series that influenced a whole generation. Cardboard models of spaceships, few and simple special effects, a small number of actors always engaged in the same mock-up of the command bridge of a starship. And, yet …
Humans find it very hard to identify a trend that is affected by natural variability, instead getting caught up in short term variations like the "Climate Pause". This may have disabled humanity’s urgency in taking a sustainable path,
After centuries of overconfident pronouncements about "Man’s conquest of Nature," it’s past time to start grappling with an unwelcome reality: what do we do when Nature wins?
Fourteen people gathered on Saturday in our kitchen to make kimchi, the Korean dish of cabbage, peppers, ginger and garlic; a smelly, spicy fermented superfood reputed to repel colds, infections and other assorted health downers.
Great ideas, projects and enterprises seldom originate from a single person working in isolation.
Whenever an existing hierarchically organized system becomes sufficiently ossified and dysfunctional to give an obvious edge to an improvised, anarchic, perhaps initially inferior alternative, there is a possibility that such an alternative will materialize out of nowhere, spread virally, become dominant, and then, in turn, become hierarchical and ossified.
I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read about the importance of developing resilience. It’s mentioned all over the web and for good reason, as it’s a critical coping mechanism. Most of those articles however, are directed at developing resilience within the adult population. Seldom, do we talk about how parents can and should create resilience in children, particularly when there are many parents out there who are doing the exact opposite of what’s required.
France is about to legalize gay marriage. This has caused some turmoil in some part of the opinion and the right wing opposition bitterly opposes it, mostly, I think, to show they are indeed the Opposition. Indeed, the very fact that a measure which concerns only 5% of the population has become, in the middle of a major economic crisis, one of the focuses of our collective conversation tells a lot about how impotent our rulers have become.
The two narratives that I watch constantly going back and forth, I think of them as "Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-doom" of our vision of the future. It’s either the narrative of progress or the narrative of apocalypse; one or the other.
We like to think, as Transitioners, we are classless, but we are not…We are constructed socially to fit into tiers. No matter what class we are born into, there are always people above us and people below us. And every transaction we make or thought we have is tempered by our conditioning: to keep ourselves on that rung, or climb the ladder, and for that we have to push others down. Them, Her, that district, those people.
