Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The major development underpinning the prospect for an early-century peak in human population and even earlier peak in civilizational power is a rapid and seemingly unexpected decline in fertility rates across the world. All regions except Africa are now below the replacement rate, and still falling.
With the biggest election year in history underway — and threats to democracy facing the United States and many other countries — I decided to ask Ivan about the many practical lessons he learned from Otpor’s success. Here, in Ivan’s own words, is the story of bringing down a dictator.
So, what would an eco-socialist education agenda look like? Broadly, it would claw back education from the capitalists and expand the public realm while aligning education with ecology.
So to put today in human context… tonight will be a short summer night, one of many that feel more or less the same to my human body. Tomorrow the sun will rise very early and I will rise to greet the new day and savor the unfolding of time. These are the scales of a human life. And that, too, is good.
Music has been an integral part of the human experience for thousands of years, and continues to embody a unique aspect of culture across the world today – yet most people hold only a preliminary understanding of the full range of benefits that sound, resonance, and harmonics can provide. Today, Nate is joined by ethnomusicologist Alexandre Tannous for a deep dive on the evolution of the human relationship with sound and how music could be used as a tool to facilitate personal resilience and healing.
Of all the pivotal technologies discovered by humans, fire making was the one that gifted our species with power beyond all others.
Resilience is the weak point of the economic-social-political system we have come to know as the “West”.
Most people never sing aloud anymore, except meekly in church, and snicker at those who do. Older people, though, can remember people whistling as they swept the streets, everyone singing at the pub, neighbours gathering at each other’s homes in the evenings to sing, or people gathering around a deathbed to caoin.
Creating successful Transition groups is not easy, but one of the beauties of the Transition movement is that people often share what works as much as they share what doesn’t. Insights from the experiences Don shares here, his own and that of the wider movement, will make it so much easier for you to get started.
I’ve had a quick read of Labour’s manifesto, so you don’t have to. It is immeasurably weaker than the Greens’ on climate, nature, etc. It is of course superior to the Conservatives’ actually climate-wrecking promises. But that is an incredibly low bar.
Polycrisis vs metacrisis may seem like a distinction without a difference, but Rowson persuaded me that the different words have a different impact on our sense of agency in the face of crisis. ‘Metacrisis’, he argues, is more likely to give us the scope to act.
Near-term population decline via falling fertility may be the most humane way to gift an intact world to countless lives of the future. Ideally, the 8 billion humans around today live full lives and spare future generations (not just humans) of a dismal fate by dialing things down.
