An essential element of a functioning community is that all roles are filled, that people individually and together do what is necessary for the success of the community. In this era of climate change and contracting energy resources, one important and potentially divisive issue is household roles.Many American households these days are just fueling stations for people who sleep and microwave in order to return to work or school. When both parents work and the kids spend all day outside of … [Read more...]
Step Aside Agribusiness: It’s Time for Real Solutions to the Climate Crisis
The recent UN Climate Action Summit was tricky for agribusiness CEOs. With forest fires raging in the Amazon, a damning new report about the food system by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and millions of young people out in streets clamoring to shut down fossil fuels and factory farming, it wasn’t easy for the world's largest food and agribusiness companies to get away with another round of voluntary pledges to reduce their gigantic emissions.At the last UN summit on … [Read more...]
What is ‘Energy Denial’?
The fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day of 1970 will be in 2020. As environmentalism has gone mainstream during that half-century, it has forgotten its early focus and shifted toward green capitalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than abandonment of the slogan popular during the early Earth Days: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”The unspoken motto of today’s Earth Day is “Recycle, Occasionally Reuse, and Never Utter the Word ‘Reduce.’” A quasi-taboo on the word “reduce” permeates … [Read more...]
Land Without Bread: the Green New Deal forsakes America’s countryside
Days after the heart-stopping Notre-Dame Cathedral fire in April, Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg trained her eyes on the United Kingdom’s parliament and chastised its meager response to climate change. “I want you to panic,” the baby-faced sixteen-year-old quietly instructed the adults in the room. “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” For those who don’t get the reference, Notre-Dame’s … [Read more...]
The 9% lie: industrial food and climate change
The Climate Emergency is finally getting the attention of the media and the U.S. (and world) body politic, as well as a growing number of politicians, activists and even U.S. farmers.This great awakening has arrived just in time, given the record-breaking temperatures, violent weather, crop failures and massive waves of forced migration that are quickly becoming the norm. Global scientists have dropped their customary caution. They now warn us that we have to drastically reduce global … [Read more...]
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 is being challenged by a much gentler, … [Read more...]
Economics 101 and Ecological Collapse
"The collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon." – David AttenboroughToday’s economics, especially Economics 101, is a major source of humankind’s denial of the possibility of the calamity of all calamities, which our economy is engineering. Annually, millions of students around the world are forced to study textbooks that indoctrinate them into thinking that there is no significant causal connection between our economy and the ecosphere. … [Read more...]
The Farms of the Future
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 generation of farmers could only tell her how to grow as they did, using chemical fertilizers, toxic … [Read more...]
Connecting the Dots: Insane Trade and Climate Chaos
Imagine a world where food routinely gets shipped thousands of miles away to be processed, then shipped back to be sold right where it started. Imagine cows from Mexico being fed corn imported from the United States, then being exported to the United States for butchering, and the resulting meat being shipped back to Mexico, one last time, to be sold. Imagine a world in which, in most years since 2005, China has somehow managed to import more goods from itself than from the USA, one of its … [Read more...]
Why the “Anthropocene” is not “Climate Change”
“Anthropocene” is a widely proposed name for the geological epoch that covers human impact on our planet. But it is not synonymous with “climate change,” nor can it covered by “environmental problems.” Bigger and more shocking, the Anthropocene encapsulates the evidence that human pressures became so profound around the middle of the 20th century that we blew a planetary gasket. Hello, new Earth System. Hello, Anthropocene.The phrase “Earth System” refers to the entirety of our planet’s … [Read more...]