Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
There is nowhere in the industrialised world where food is produced sustainably. The only place where that happens is the non-industrialised world where the main 2 energy inputs are forms of renewable energy – human and animal muscle power.
The Enlightenment, modernity, technology, fossil fuels and capitalism were mutually reinforcing and permeated daily practices, which in turn galvanized the system; earlier greed was bad, then it became ok and then good and now, finally, it is an essential virtue. This insight has implications for how we instill change.
In my 2012 essay in The Futurist, I concluded that we might no longer be able to get out of the mess we were creating for ourselves, but we could get through it. There was still plenty to dream of, and to strive for. Today, hope remains, unreasonable, hanging by a thread.
An appeal by the Founding Farmers of EARA to join us in our journey to farm for regeneration and advocate together to re-root Europe towards a prosperous future.
What if we could bring the natural world to our own yards? What if we could connect our yards in such a way that we create a kind of continuation of our national parks, where nature is restored and we can be right in the middle of it all?
The ways out are small and silent and obscure. And they do not come with publishing contracts… The ways out are doing the work and being an embodied life. The ways out do not need leaders or mass action or public law. They do not require expert opinion or explication. The ways out are just that… out. No more of this…
In this episode, Nate is joined by longtime colleagues Tom Murphy and D.J. White for an in-depth exploration of the mounting ecological crises driven by human behavior and unsustainable energy consumption.
Even if Helene and Milton and hurricanes, forest fires, and droughts of the past haven’t cost all Americans—the next ones will. The clean energy and environmental communities need to make economics the dominant theme of their arguments.
A while back, I came across a fascinating paper from 2007 by Gurven and Kaplan on longevity among hunter-gatherers that helped me understand aspects of what life was (and is) like outside of modernity. My interest is both a matter of pure curiosity, and to gain perspective on how desperate life feels—or doesn’t—to members of pre-agricultural (ecological) cultures.
After a historic referendum, Ecuador’s government had a year to stop drilling oil in a protected part of the Amazon. Now the deadline has passed, but the oil still flows. Behind the inaction is a story of corruption, murder, social breakdown, and tenacious activists who want the world to know about it.
Does this plastic orgy simply continue until we’re all reproductively compromised and the problem solves itself? Or is there a solution to the plastic world we’re entombing ourselves in?
Resilience is not measured by wealth and access to power alone. It is often, perhaps even more so, calculated by the culture, strength, and community of a people.
