Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Unsung Films watched Mike Freedman’s Critical Mass this year when it screened at the Biografilm Festival in Bologna, Italy. On approaching the filmmaker with a short review of his documentary, we ended up with a great deal more: a 3000-word interview taking readers deep into the story of how Freedman’s film came together, how it affected him – both personally and professionally — and what we should expect in the years to come.
The brave new world of “owning life” began 32 years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court first approved the patenting of a genetically engineered bacteria that can help decompose oil. By a 5-4 decision, it was the first instance of U.S. law recognizing ownership in a “manufactured” lifeform. On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to participate on a panel with the microbiologist who brought that 1980 case, Ananda Chakrabarty, who was then an employee of General Electric. Anyone who noses around the legal literature soon realizes that the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty is a real landmark case because it opened the door for the patenting of lifeforms.
For indigenous peoples, resilience is rooted in traditional knowledge, as their capacity to adapt to environmental change is based first and foremost on in-depth understanding of the land. As climate change increasingly impacts indigenous landscapes, communities are responding and adapting in unique ways.
Many people dismiss the risks associated with oil depletion and climate change–even many who accept the two issues as problems. They judge those risks to be small or at least manageable. Since no one can know the future, we cannot be sure whether they are right or wrong. But even if they are right, should we be so sanguine? As we examine this question, keep in mind that we are talking about probabilities and the level of risk, not absolute knowledge which none of us can have about the future.
In this one hour presentation, Richard Heinberg explains the close link between the resource/environment and the social/economic components of the present disintegration.
In Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville there is almost no set. Buildings in the town are represented by a series of white outlines on the floor. Dogville was a to-the-limit exercise in what von Trier calls “pure cinema” a commitment to use only real locations, and no special effects or background music, when making a film. I was reminded of Dogville during a this year’s Transition Conference in London. There were talks and workshops, of course, but our main task was to create the working physical model of a town centre, a few years ahead, in which the services needed for a resilient community would be in place — and open for business. We had four hours to do it.
I came out of school at the age of 17 highly literate but almost completely dystechnic. Since there is no word for the manual equivalent of illiterate I have had to coin one, and ‘dystechnic’ is the best I can do.
The definition of sustainability, like many definitions, depends upon one’s viewpoint. One’s experience and geographic setting heavily influence the way one sees the world. In this paper, we examine sustainability from two distinct locations, a highly urbanized and suburbanized island setting in the global north, and a remote island archipelago in the global south. Both locations have distinct cultural and geographic heritages. Each provides an interesting way to explore the meaning of sustainability within our current era.
Whether you buy into Revolution’s watered-down examination of social contract theory, the show’s premise reinforces Post Carbon Institute’s position that it is absolutely necessary that we plan our energy future. We must work hard to transition as smoothly as possible to largely fossil fuel free communities. If we’re caught off guard (too late?), chaos is quite likely.
Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin is our prince’s name, and he eventually became a renowned scientist who advanced the understanding of the history of glaciers, an historian of revolutionary movements, foremost theoretician of anarchism, and, because of his lifelong burning desire to do something to help the plight of the common man, something of a revolutionary himself.
As the corruption of the market/state duopoly has deepened, our very language for identifying problems and imagining solutions has been compromised. The snares and deceptions embedded in our prevailing political language go very deep. Such dualisms as “public” and “private,” and “state” and “market,” and “nature and culture,” for example, are taken as self-evident.
Since Babylon’s U.S. region is currently in the grip of its periodic voting hysteria, many pundits, apologists and propagandists for Wall Street’s Lefty/Righty sockpuppets assure us that we absolutely must vote. They even go as far as asserting, as Rebecca Solnit does, that “if you want to be political you have to pay attention to electoral politics and maybe even work with it.” Gasp. You can’t be political without turning into an Obamabot or a Romney dawg (the Noz Pinscher)?! What a ghastly world some people inhabit, and by choice, no less…
