Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Today the monarchs are all but gone. That sad fact hit home this week as I read of the 97 percent collapse of the Western monarch population. No number of inspired “Ten Things You Can Do” articles, no amount of milkweed replanting, will revive a species once it falls into the past.
There is much we simply don’t know about the continuity of life. Perhaps the wisdom we need most is already right before our eyes in the awesome wonder of the natural world, and all we need to do is open ourselves to it.
Chris Martenson’s recent article about collapse and the plummeting of biodiversity made me think about what it feels like to be left behind. Few people living in affluent countries or communities understand what this means.
We may think like the wild, or we may think like the tamed. We humans, products, beneficiaries, and dependents of the web of life from which we were spun, can continue our collective course on this tangential path from the natural processes, limits, and communities of this planet.
Fair-Weather Brother is a portrait of the many environmental, economic and social challenges plaguing India today. The novella’s author, who goes by the pseudonym Pogoat, lives in India and thus knows of these issues firsthand.
Quite suddenly, in the wake of the recent IPCC report, it’s become commonplace to talk about a global climate emergency. Al Gore told PBS on 12 October: “We have a global emergency. You use a phrase like that and some people immediately say, ‘okay calm down, it can’t be that bad.’ But it it is.”
Our society needs a real conversation about the meaning and nature of economic growth. In a time of populist politics and rising regional discontent, it is more important than ever to examine new models and approaches of sustainable, equitable and just development.
There may be more electric vehicles on the world’s roads, but there are also more internal combustion engines. There be more bicycles, but there are also more planes. It doesn’t matter how many good things we do: preventing climate breakdown means ceasing to do bad things.
In an era in which we are already dramatically overshooting the planetary boundary on material footprint, this means that aggregate global economic growth cannot continue if we want to avoid chewing through the web of life on which our civilization depends.
Stopping the destructive effects of industrial, capitalist civilization has now become the defining challenge of our age. If successful grassroots struggles can be linked with equally hopeful movements for real political change, then there is hope for the future.
Protecting the children is a formidable responsibility. But it is our responsibility, and we bring to the task a formidable set of powers, honed, sharpened, and passed down mother-to-daughter over generations.
Collecting first into bands, then villages, then cities, then states, now humans form a single, giant creature – the superorganism – which is literally devouring the planet to keep itself growing. I
