Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The “canary in a coal mine” is a metaphor originating from the time when caged birds were carried into the mines as an early warning system; the canary would die before methane and carbon gases reached levels hazardous to humans.
It’s a curious thing, this attempt of mine to make sense of the future by understanding what’s happened in the past. One of the most curious things about it, at least to me, is the passion with which so many people insist that this isn’t an option at all.
Novels, short stories, photos, art, music, and performance are just a few of the ways we are telling and intend to tell more of the stories of climate justice around the world. This last essay explores the power of another medium for telling stories, and presents some of the most compelling recent film and video work that tells us on some profound plane of existence what we must do about the huge problems we face.
Here I will be laying out what I consider to be the core elements and principle guidelines for civic/popular programs for democratic praxis. First, some definitions.
So, as one small effort to try to organize my thoughts about politics in the Trump era, let me see if I can make the case for why urbanism should, and usually does, comport with localism, and thus why urban-sympathetic conservatives and radical and democratic localists, as we all face 2017, have much in common.
The focus of this initial circuit has been the popular practice of defining permaculture design as, above all else, a process of assembling elements into whole systems.
In a global economy where we drive cars built in Japan, work on computers made in China and eat shrimp caught and peeled in Thailand, why do we hesitate to use oil pumped in Saudi Arabia? Do we fear oil shortages or embargoes? We’ve weathered those before. The oil exporting countries can only hold back so long- they have to sell the stuff. Camels won’t drink it, and you can’t make vodka from it.
So below I offer my own thoughts on how to move closer to the worlds we want, based on much comparative reflection on the stories of people everywhere who have acted in the name of radical social change, which for me, means something like “deep transformation of a society”…
In Part I, last week, I made the case for the over-riding importance for a major shift in the strategic focus for all democratic change movements, and especially for co-operative/solidarity economics. Here in Part II I sketch out how I think we can begin moving decisively toward community and regional networks with a cultural/structural strategy.
Western Europe and Scandinavia have been held up as leaders in moving to a low-carbon future in electricity generation, but the reality is very mixed. Scandinavia benefits from its large hydroelectric resources, relative to population size, and therefore has a very low electricity carbon footprint. France is low carbon due to its predominantly nuclear-based generating capacity.
Soil is the second biggest reservoir of carbon on the planet, next to the oceans. It holds four times more carbon than all the plants and trees in the world.
Underneath all the jargon and mystery, economics is fundamentally about deciding things that shape all our lives – what we should spend our time doing, and how money and resources should be distributed. This course is about reclaiming those topics.
