Climate Change
The Well is Running Dry on Irrigated Agriculture
Too much rain, but not enough water. That’s the title of a recent article about the massive rainstorms that hit California last December. The US state got a lot of badly needed rain, but, as pointed out in the article, this was nowhere near enough to save it from the severe drought the region is…
Read MoreWhy we must abolish the Energy Charter Treaty
Greta Thunberg made international headlines this week when she and other climate activists were briefly detained by police at a protest against the expansion of a coal mine in Germany. Thunberg was among the thousands of protesters who arrived to denounce the expansion of the huge Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine by German energy company RWE.…
Read MoreLow-tech solutions
Most mainstream responses to climate chaos today rely heavily on high technology and big business. We rarely hear about solutions – often rooted in the past – that are localized, low-tech, and don’t advance the interests of large corporations. These are precisely the kind of technologies explored in depth on Low-Tech Magazine. What follows is…
Read MoreGetting out of the food-energy-climate crisis
On 11 October 2022, the International Monetary Fund’s head of research, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, warned that today’s high energy prices were not going away any time soon. The “energy crisis”, he cautioned, “is not a transitory shock”. The same could be said for what he called the “food crisis”. As Gourinchas noted, today’s high prices for…
Read MoreAn agribusiness greenwashing glossary
The global food system is broken. It is responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it is the leading driver behind the collapse of the world’s biodiversity. Meanwhile, 1 in 10 people around the world go to bed hungry, while hundreds of millions more suffer from diabetes, obesity, cancers and other health…
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 MoreCan small-scale farmers feed the world?
One of the things I wondered about a lot during my first months of work in the food system was productivity. Growing up in a Minority World country, practically all of my food came from large-scale, industrial farms. As a result, I – like many others – believed for a long time that industrial agriculture…
Read MoreRepairing broken economies
Sepp Eisenriegler loves giving second chances: to the defunct electrical appliances awaiting repair or refurbishment, the hundreds of unemployed people he’s trained as skilled repairers over the decades and even the two rescue dogs that follow him devotedly around Reparatur-und Service-Zentrum (R.U.S.Z.), the repair and service center he founded in Vienna in 1998. It wasn’t…
Read MoreThe World’s Food Systems are in Crisis: Big Agribusiness is to Blame
In 2017, the people of Zagora, Morocco, took to the streets in what became known as the ‘thirst revolution’. They were demanding safe drinking water and an end to the excessive use of water by big agricultural companies. In an already arid area experiencing frequent droughts and heatwaves due to climate change, much of the…
Read MoreThe inner dimension of climate adaptation
Capitalism in its earliest incarnation dates back to the end of Europe’s medieval period. ‘Growth’, such as it was, first manifested itself in the innovation and creativity of the Renaissance, while economic expansion in the commonly understood sense was to come later. The commercial revolution of the 16th century, the scientific breakthroughs of the 17th…
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