For more than 150 years, from the rural South to northern cities, Black people have used farming to build self-determined communities and resist oppressive structures that tear them down. Today, agriculture still serves an important role in the lives of Black people, which is why we see urban agriculture projects and programs in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Washington D.C. and other cities across the United States. In all of these cities, there are Black-led organizations cultivating food and … [Read more...]
Our Robot Overlords
A consequence of the current pandemic is an increase in computer use. Almost everyone’s feeling it: students are doing classes by Zoom, employees are online for team meetings, musicians are performing to their phones, consumers are ordering food, clothes, and a hundred other things to be delivered, television shows recorded in front of live audiences are now being filmed in living rooms, and streaming services and even porn sites are seeing increased usage. I’m at the computer more than I … [Read more...]
Locking Down Leviathan
The streets of Jayanagar, a residential area in Bengaluru, are strewn with spring flowers. Yellow copper pods, lilac crape myrtles, pink-and-white honges and orange gulmohurs blaze overhead and underfoot; vitality and senescence mirroring each other. The normally hard surfaces - kerb, pavement, road and concrete - are softened by fallen petals and the duff of stamens from rain trees. Every flower seems more brilliant, more beautiful now; the air is clear for the first time in decades. Jasmine … [Read more...]
Post-pandemic development: a Ladakhi perspective
A week before the announcement of the Janata [public] Curfew slated for March 22, 2020, I spoke with a 43-year-old close relative in her village in Leh, Ladakh, by phone from Delhi. Around that time, the news of rising infections from the novel coronavirus coming in from China, Italy and Iran were ominous. Ladakh had been reporting positive cases since March 6. Speaking authoritatively, a malaise that educated people tend to suffer from when speaking to "uneducated" people, I advised her to … [Read more...]
A degrowth perspective on the coronavirus crisis
The coronavirus (covid-19) has caused upheaval across the world, deaths of the most vulnerable, closed borders, financial market crashes, curfews and controls on group gatherings, and many more devastating effects. Despite observations that pollution and emissions have reduced, the sudden, un-planned, and chaotic downscaling of social and economic activity due to covid-19 is categorically not degrowth. Instead, it’s an example of why degrowth is needed: it shows the unsustainability and … [Read more...]
Coronavirus and the Death of ‘Connectivity’
The Covid 19 pandemic is the second major crisis of globalization in a decade. The first was the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, from which the global economy took years to reach a semblance of recovery. We did not learn our lessons from the first, and this is perhaps why the impact of the second has been even more massive. Trillions of dollars of paper wealth went up in smoke during the 2008 crisis, but few cried for the out-of-control financial players who had triggered the crisis. … [Read more...]
Not Giving up on Happiness: Care of the Self and Well-Being in a Plague Year
The specter of plague haunts our world, and it brings with it not only the ghouls of disease and death but vast economic and social uncertainty of a sort only the most elderly among us remembers (the Great Depression and World War II). My father is 90 and when I called him a child of the depression once, he pointed out to me that as someone born in 1929, he really didn’t come to political consciousness until the Depression had ended. He was too young to fight in the war, though he joined the … [Read more...]
5 ways coronavirus could help humanity survive the ecological crisis
The human tragedy of the coronavirus is immense. Thousands have died, hundreds of thousands have been infected globally, and millions more have been affected. Whilst infectious disease has always been a part of the human experience, the expansion of industrial civilization has inexorably amplified the risk of new diseases. Uncontrolled industrial expansion also dangerously heats the planet and drives the collapse of ecosystems worldwide. Experts like Professor Jem Bendell and philosopher … [Read more...]
My Year Without Industrial Food
For the last year I grew and foraged 100% of my food. No grocery stores, no restaurants, not even a drink at a bar. Nature was my garden, my pantry and my pharmacy. Most people would imagine I live in the countryside on a farm, but actually I live in a city – Orlando, Florida, a few miles from the center. When I arrived here, I didn’t own any land, so in order to grow my food I met people in the neighborhood and turned their lawns into gardens and shared the bounty of food with them. I’m a … [Read more...]
Disaster localization: a constructive response to climate chaos
The moment I first learned about climate change will always stick in my mind. A seventh-grade ecology class led to a conversation between girls after school about what, back then, was being called “global warming”. Kicking at the snow while waiting for the bus in the depths of an upstate New York winter, it sounded like a good thing. Of course, we soon learned it wasn’t – and many of us became enthusiastic environmental activists, running school campaigns on decreasing electricity use, reducing … [Read more...]