Ecological Artist Basia Irland and Her “Ice Books” Engage Communities and Restore Rivers
Basia Irland is a sculptor, poet, and installation artist who has focused her creativity on rivers for thirty years.
ecology
River Killers
Destroying wild rivers to generate electricity is a false solution to humanity’s need for energy, with extremely high costs to individuals, communities, and ecosystems.
Primal Fears, Primal Joys
We’re living in a time of growing fear of what I have come to call the “Big Primal.” …Our scientists confirm that we’re not all simply imagining that our weather has gone wild; for them, the warming of the oceans and the rising of the seas are facts, not theories.
Small Talk: Life on a Farm
I live on a farm that was once part forest, part swamp. I live with animals both domesticated and wild, with plants, with flowers, with a garden. My grandparents lived here, my parents, my siblings and I, and then my children too. I walk on the land every day and never get bored. There is always something new to see and learn. In the summer, I sit on my deck, which overlooks a pond, a field, and past that, the lake. Barn swallows nest over my head. Paper wasps build small grey cones among the swallow nests.
Afghanistan, Ecology, and the End of War
Working with school children in Afghanistan, one experiences the great sweetness of the people there and the commonplace lack of ecological understanding of how the physical world works. This absence of understanding is magnified by the striking deterioration of the Afghan land and the American effort to address these pressing problems with bombs and bullets.
Follow nature and avoid collapse
“The economic relationships between and among communities at the level of the biosphere are sympathetic and circumstantial,” LaConte writes.
By contrast, industrial capitalism has led to a perfect storm of problems — climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, species extinction heading the list — that LaConte has dubbed Critical Mass…
The necessary transition to a new economy
Even Forbes is jumping on the bandwagon of the “sharing economy” with a recent article on AirBnB. This closely follows Van Jones’s CNN article about the “sharing economy,” but the push to transform our broken economy isn’t just about sharing, though; it isn’t even just about renewable energy, energy efficiency, public transportation, and the other elements of the green economy movement. There is a “new economy movement” that’s pushing for a fundamental shift away from the neoliberal policies that have dominated our economy and society for decades.
Climate – Jan 23
•Can anyone defuse the ‘Carbon Bomb’? •Point of No Return: The massive climate threats we must avoid •Climate change set to make America hotter, drier and more disaster-prone •Koch-Funded Study Finds 2.5°F Warming Of Land Since 1750 Is Manmade, ‘Solar Forcing Does Not Appear To Contribute’ •Climate Change Reaching Human and Geophysical Tipping Points •Has global warming ground to a halt?
From Green New Deal to New Economy Coalition (Part I)
Here is a short overview and strategic assessment of the green economy movement, including its organizational makeup. It concludes with recommendations for transitioning from a double bottom line movement to a triple bottom line one: being more inclusive of historically marginalized communities.