Peasant movements in Asia marked March 29 as the Day of the Landless. The day pays tribute to the founding of the Asia Peasant Coalition (APC). About 15-million strong, the APC was established in 2003 by more than 20 organizations from 11 countries representing farmers, landless peasants, fishers, agricultural workers, Dalits, indigenous peoples, herders and pastoralists, and rural women and youth. This year, the annual commemoration by peasant groups and advocates took cognizance of the upcoming Food Systems Summit (FSS) […]
Is resistance futile? The myth of tech inevitability
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” — Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage The relationship between technology and narrative is long-standing. Indeed, some have argued that it is at the heart of human civilization. It was once fashionable to characterize human beings as tool-using animals (although this turns out not to be the best way of getting at whatever might be distinctly human). It has also been suggested […]
Net zero and ‘nature-based’ solutions: corporate greenwashing
Corporations are, without a doubt, the number one obstacle to meaningful action on the climate crisis. These almighty actors have spent the past two decades undermining scientific consensus, blocking meaningful legislation and greenwashing their own responsibility. Even the last ditch Paris Agreement, with its lame voluntary commitment to keep the world to a still disastrous 1.5 degrees of warming, has done nothing to stop corporate greed from taking the planet to the brink. Since the signing of the Paris Agreement […]
Co-opting Regenerative Agriculture
There’s one skill that Big Food and Big Ag corporations have in abundance: taking control of every situation and corrupting it into an opportunity for profit. For example, as consumer interest in the terms “natural” and “sustainable” increased, industrial agribusiness began to use these unsubstantiated terms to market greenwashed products. These products were, in fact, just the opposite – made with pesticide-laden, factory farmed, and/or genetically engineered ingredients. Even the powerful Organic movement, which actually is based on specific certifiable […]
Trade treaties and the climate emergency
The chickens have come home to roost for Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. Kenney bet around $1.5 billion of public money on a very risky prospect – the highly controversial Keystone XL pipeline. U.S. President Joe Biden, to the surprise of no one but Kenney, followed through on an election promise and cancelled a key permit for the pipeline on the first day of his administration. Now the premier is scrambling for a way to recoup some of Alberta’s losses, and […]
How to fix a food system that’s not designed to feed people
Earlier this year, Americans learned what it looks like when a food system reliant on industrial agriculture, near monopolies and exploited laborers breaks down. Just two months into the pandemic, the meat industry in the most powerful nation in the world was buckling. In March and April, COVID-19 swept through meatpacking plants, infecting thousands of workers. In Colorado, an outbreak at a huge JBS beef processing facility killed six workers. In South Dakota, as cases surged in a Smithfield pork […]
Local is Our Future
[The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness, a new book by Helena Norberg-Hodge, published by Local Futures in July 2019.] For our species to have a future, it must be local. The good news is that the path to such a future is already being forged. Away from the screens of the mainstream media, the crude ‘bigger is better’ narrative that has dominated economic thinking for centuries […]
The Farms of the Future
This blog is also available in Russian and Spanish. Hou Xueying, a mother from Shanghai, was tired of food safety scares and of a city life disconnected from the land. So she moved her family to the country to learn about sustainable farming. Her parents disapproved; they had struggled to give her a comfortable life in the city — they could not understand why she would throw it away. When she got to the country, she found that the older […]
Controlling 5G: A Course in Obstacles
Across the United States, telecom providers have begun mapping their plans to deploy 5G “small,” microwave-emitting cellular sites throughout neighborhoods. Every person deserves to be informed about what’s happening and what’s within every household’s ability to control. Already the largest thing that humanity has built, we double the Internet’s size every two years. The Internet of Things (IoT), also known as machine-to-machine communication, generates data traffic via the “smart” power grid, billions of mobile phone and Internet users who expect […]
Growthism: its ecological, economic and ethical limits
We have many problems – poverty, unemployment, environmental destruction, climate change, financial instability, etc. – but only one solution for everything, namely economic growth. We believe that growth is the costless, win-win solution to all problems, or at least the necessary precondition for any solution. This is growthism. It now creates more problems than it solves. A journey of no return, not a circular economy The economic process is not a mechanical analog that can be run forward and backward, […]