Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I have come to realize that language is an indispensable portal into the deeper mysteries of the commons. The words we use – to name aspects of nature, to evoke feelings associated with each other and shared wealth, to express ourselves in sly, subtle or playful ways – our words themselves are bridges to the natural world. They mysteriously makes it more real or at least more socially legible.
For two months in 2012, longtime Iola, Kansas, resident Mary Ross trudged through the sweltering heat, waving gnats from her view as she walked door to door with a petition. It was the hottest summer since moving there with her family about 30 years ago, but Ross was determined to gather signatures requesting a grocery store be established in the small rural town of fewer than 6,000 people.
As captains of the fossil fuel industries and their lobbyists prepare to take over the White House – appointed by a President elected by a minority, claiming to represent the people on an anti-elite ticket yet possessing by far the highest cumulative wealth of any cabinet ever – they will face evidence breaking out all around them of a fast-moving global energy transition threatening to strand the fossil fuels they seek to boost.
Before there was indigenous resistance at Standing Rock, there was Black Lives Matter (and before that, Occupy, and before that the Zapatistas, and before that, May ‘68… and at the bottom of everything, there’s a turtle standing on an island).
The two statements – Ezra Silk of the Climate Mobilization’s 100-plus page Victory Plan and Bill McKibben’s essay “A World at War” – have led to a healthy and vigorous debate about these ideas and their potential to play a role in the US response to the greatest global challenge of the 21st century.
Authors Richard Heinberg and David Fridley in their recent book Our Renewable Future make the case for a society that runs on 100 percent renewable energy. But they don’t pull any punches, giving us both the good news and the bad news.
A few days from now, 2016 will have passed into the history books. I know a fair number of people who won’t mourn its departure, but it’s pretty much a given that the New Year celebrations here in the United States, at least, will demonstrate a marked shortage of enthusiasm for the arrival of 2017.
It is the tiniest of sounds, yet it penetrates the collection of louder and deeper bleats that surround it.
NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed. LEAN LOGIC: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It Edited by Shaun Chamberlin (Chelsea Green Publishing, September 2016, 623 pages, Hardcover $50.00) and SURVIVING THE FUTURE: Culture, Carnival, and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy A Story from Lean Logic Selected … Read more
The problem of sustainability is simple enough to state. It requires that the fertility cycle of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay—what Albert Howard called “the Wheel of Life”—must turn continuously in place, so that the law of return is kept and nothing is wasted. For this to happen in the stewardship of humans, there … Read more
We have empirical evidence that extreme options never win in this procedure. They always lose.
I planted them with the hope
That my foolish culture will soon desist in its
Suicidal efforts to sever the ties
Between humans and the Earth
