Posts Tagged ‘well-being’
The Caravan of Hope: Uncovering a Localising Japan
To many, Japan is a poster child of globalisation. With its commercial boom and bustling megacities, it’s a vision in neon, characterised by high technology, consumerism, and ruthless capitalist competition. But fissures in the country’s modernising dream run deep: rising poverty, environmental decline, food insecurity, and, infamously, an epidemic of youth suicide and depression that…
Read MoreThe Abundance of Subsistence
One late-summer day, a day so hot the mosquitoes weren’t flying, my brother and his wife and I traveled nine miles up the Unalakleet River to seine for humpies, or pink salmon. We laughed and hollered while pulling the net to a flat, wide bar made of perfect skipping and throwing stones at the inside…
Read MoreEmbrace Your Crookedness
I don’t know why exactly we gravitate to certain writers or thinkers, not just as convenient citations we drop here and there, maybe to add a bit of heft to our own flimsy pronouncements or to have the sheen of their prose shine on our lackluster sentences – but as people, people we want to…
Read MoreLocal Food for Rapid Transition
As a nature-loving child growing up in the 2000s, I was debilitated and depressed by the idea that we could either save species and ecosystems, or provide a reasonable quality of life to human beings. Everything I was implicitly taught about ‘development’ and ‘progress’, at school and in the media, pointed to one seemingly inexorable…
Read MoreRethinking Technology and the Good Society
Despite suffering from debilitating headaches and generally poor health, Weil completed her work during a remarkable burst of activity. She died later that year at the age of 34. The report was published in 1949. The first English translation appeared in 1952 as The Need for Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind.…
Read MoreFrom ‘Progress’ to an Economics of Happiness
If there’s one thing I’d love world leaders to think about in connection with the UN’s International Day of Happiness, it’s that their measure of progress actually goes up with unhappiness and unrest. GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, which is still used as the principal indicator for development and progress, simply measures the exchange of…
Read MoreHumility and the myth of limitlessness
I might be wrong about this, but it seems that over the last couple of years more and more people have been working their way to the conclusion that modern society is fundamentally broken – not just broken in a way that can be fixed with a little tinkering here and there, but somehow broken…
Read MoreWhat if food were treated as a human right?
It can be difficult to imagine a world – or even a city – without hunger. It seems so endemic to the world we live in that it can appear intractable. But there are examples around the world of places that have reorganized themselves to eradicate food insecurity completely, whether it be within one community…
Read MoreLocalization and Buen Vivir
Today, there exists what in my estimation is an unprecedented moment for altering the course of human history. The hopes and dreams for a more equitable, peaceful, just and livable world now have an opening for their realization as never before, which has come about due to the impacts on society from accelerating climate fluctuations…
Read MoreThe food shortage solution in your backyard
A confluence of crises – lockdowns and business closures, mandates and worker shortages, supply chain disruptions and inflation, sanctions and war – have compounded to trigger food shortages; and we have been warned that they may last longer than the food stored in our pantries. What to do? Jim Gale, founder of Food Forest Abundance,…
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