Streetfacts #4: Children Have Lost the Freedom to Roam
The percentage of children walking and bicycling to school has plummeted from almost 50 percent in 1969 to about 13 percent today.
Culture & Behavior
A Desire Named Streetcar
Twentysomethings are eschewing their cars in never-before-seen numbers for alternate forms of transit…
Lawns Of Purple and Gold
We burn 800 million gallons of gas mowing lawns, and statisticians say that we spill 17 million gallons every year just refilling our lawn machines. If so, that beats the Exxon Valdez spill of 10 million gallons.
The Pleasures of Extinction
The latest apocalyptic fad is near-term human extinction, or NTE for short: the claim that humanity, along with most other life on Earth, will inevitably be extinct by 2030 at the latest.
The Song Remains the Same
If you always do what you’ve always done, a popular saying nowadays has it, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten. Most people accept that readily enough in the abstract. It’s when they attempt to apply this logic to their own lives and thinking that they get tripped up…
Building an Enduring Environmental Movement
…it is time for the environmental movement to evolve. It needs to accelerate the shift to a sustainable society and to become more independent and resilient, even in the worst-case scenario of a rapid ecological transition. The only question is, How?
The Shape of Time
Trying to have a conversation about the issues central to this sequence of posts, to make use of an apt if familiar metaphor, is rather like trying to discuss the nature of water with fish. The ideas that play the largest part in shaping our experience of the world and of ourselves are so deeply woven into the act of perception itself that we rarely if ever notice them until we run face first into their limits.
The God with Three Heads
It’s been said that a man’s religion is the thing he can’t bear to have questioned. If there’s any truth in that old saying, the idea that faith in progress is a religion has a great deal going for it.
Kendrick Perkins is the belief
In February 2011, the Boston Celtics were riding high…When I tell you this story has everything to do with climate change and the power of belief, no doubt you’ll make a face.
Climate – Dec 6
•Climate change: you can’t ignore it •2012: Record Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Multiple Extremes and High Temperatures •Study: Wealthy Nations’ Fossil Fuel Subsidies 5 Times Greater Than Climate Aid to Countries in Need •No sign of emissions letting up as climate talks begin •Forbidden Planet Arctic lost record snow and ice last year as data shows changing climate
Crippling Intellects
People can be individually smart and collectively dumb. Or some may argue that people can be individually dumb yet collectively smart. When it comes to plotting a future path, I think we often get the worst of both worlds. In this post, I’ll look at the role that mental horsepower plays in our societal narratives, for better or for worse. We’ll explore two aspects to the problem: people who are so smart that they have dumb ideas; and smart people who are held captive by the manufactured “dumb” of society.
The sufficiency economy: envisioning a prosperous way down
If a society does not have some vision of where it wants to be or what it wants to become, it cannot know whether it is heading in the right direction – it cannot even know whether it is lost. This is the confused position of consumer capitalism today, which has a fetish for economic growth but no answer to the question of what that growth is supposed to be for.