Culture & Behavior

From Suzuki to revolution: my road to the barricades

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In 1989, while attending a rally to save an old-growth forest from the corporate saw, I heard David Suzuki thunderously denounce the world’s economists for their stupidity. He accused them of encouraging economic growth while ignoring ecological limits, thus causing irreversible damage to the environment. I soon put my career on hold, returned to university, and began to study this apparently destructive discipline. My journey to the revolutionary barricades had begun.

The iFinger

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Apple today announced record sales of the recently released iFinger implants. Although smaller than the iBellyTop and the iForearm, the iFinger continues the concept of a wafer-thin chip-screen embedded in the human body, available around the clock and at any location for viewing Internet, videos, and music. Apple proclaimed, “The iFinger technology will change life as we know it across the planet forever in every way possible.”

Soils and souls: the promise of the land

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In the search for alternatives to our dead-end industrial agriculture system, Land Institute researchers are pursuing plant breeding programs in Salina, KS that just may be the key to post-oil farming. In late September, the Institute’s 2010 Prairie Festival began with three talks – by poet/novelist Wendell Berry, economist Josh Farley, and biologist Sandra Steingraber. The three were telling the story of how sin brought us to this place, how we must redefine success if we are to atone, and how essential that change is for our own safety. I left the barn that day with one revelation burning in my brain: While evil lurks in many places, it is most concentrated in fossil fuels.

Pachakuti: Indigenous perspectives, degrowth and ecosocialism

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Indigenous movements have inserted concepts like ecosocialist and degrowth into the formal constitutions of the Bolivian and Ecuadorian states. Some call this movement the “Pachakuti”, a term taken from the Quechua “pacha”, meaning time and space or the world, and “kuti”, meaning upheaval or revolution. Put together, Pachakuti can be interpreted to symbolize a re-balancing of the world through a tumultuous turn of events that could be a catastrophe or a renovation.