Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Vermonters need to conceive of their resilience as something that enables them to imagine new futures, not stand steady in ways of the past marked by homogenous identities that sometimes do more harm than help.
Limits are a necessary part of bringing about the life I long for, and of caring for the people, places, and futures we’ve all been entrusted to keep.
If the grounded sense of beauty Momaday derived from Kiowa cultural expressions is to play a role in shaping our response to social and ecological collapse, it will need a territory that can sustain it.
Maybe changing the world is not just about spreading relevant information, and acting on it… and more about building communities that can enable us to unlearn what stands in the way of change.
As we navigate the path ahead of us, there’s a long list of goals and tasks on our list to strengthen our community, support our friends and neighbors, and create a thriving space where our crops and the people around us can flourish and benefit from the resilience we are contributing.
Microcosm: a community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of something much larger.
It’s an economy in which the essentials of life – housing, energy, land, food, water, transport, social care, the means of exchange etc. are owned in common, in communities, rather than by absentee landlords, corporations or the state.
This year Post Carbon Institute has leaned into the “Great Unraveling” as a label for framing what’s happening in modern society and the natural world. In short, the Great Unraveling represents humanity’s comeuppance from overshoot, a time when debts are coming due and the promise of everlasting growth is fading.
Our weeds are just where they belong, in our fields, along our roads, in every compromised, degraded, or devastated ecosystem. Free food and medicine in our backyards. Essential for ecosystem restoration, perhaps they will also be essential for our future food and medicine.
While mathematics and chess offer more-or-less “tame” problems with solutions that everyone agrees on, wicked problems lack clarity and are subject to real-world constraints that prevent risk-free resolution.
America has no idea how to live after the end of fossil fuels. When the country is ready to listen, ecosocialism can provide the answers it needs.
A Mennonite book on the coming crisis: “We are fighting to dismantle structures designed to remove Indigenous Peoples from their land so that our economic system can continue to extract and consume resources at an ever-increasing pace. This growth-based system, designed to generate wealth and profits for individuals, is threatening the survival of all life on this planet. Climate change, I have realized, is only one symptom of the real threat, which is ecological overshoot. “
