Our planet is radically changing and this requires a radical rethink by all of us. It requires an economic, social and environmental revolution. Each day we delay bold climate action, sea levels continue to rise, forests continue to burn in record-breaking heat and the fossil fuel industry continues to put profits ahead of human health and safety. We need to[Read More...]
Metabolic Rifts Today. Beginning a new series by Ian Angus, on how contemporary science illuminates and extends metabolic rift theory in the 21st century. In the 1860s, Karl Marx wrote that capitalism “produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”[1] By preventing the return of essential[Read More...]
Valuing Ecosystem Function higher than material things is the paradigm shift that determines whether we understand the meaning of our lives and survive or whether we remain ignorant and selfish and destroy our own habitat trying to gain more wealth or more power. If we reach this level of understanding, not only can everyone live on the Earth but the[Read More...]
We are living at the cusp of a sixth planetary extinction, possibly with the totality of the Permian Triassic. The primary culprits are the fossil fuel and related extractive industries. This essay will offer a solution by making the case for a transnational 100% Death Tax; the purpose being to demonetize ownership and control over these industries. XXXXX Our generation[Read More...]
What will the world’s sprawl of human beings look like in every major urban world centre in the next ten, fifty or one hundred years? Whichever way the world will wend, it all has something to do with that mythical search for the so-called Good Life. But how is humanity’s never-ending ethereal search for the so-called ‘Good Life’ now most[Read More...]
Zapatista women taking notes at ConCiencias. Photo credit: David Meek Below images of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and a many-headed hydra consuming humanity, sit two groups. To the right, facing a stage, are approximately 200 delegates of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), seated as a homogenous block. Wearing black ski masks, they furiously take notes. To the left, 300[Read More...]
My girlfriend Janet Ward started a food bank with a few thousand dollars from a religious leader and a small walk-in closet. Now that very same food bank puts out more than a million meals a year. This is more than a $million US dollars a year worth of food for people who would otherwise starve or partially[Read More...]
“My own little world Is what I deserve ‘Cause I am the only child there is. A king of it all The belle of the ball I promise I’ve always been like this. Forever the first My bubble can’t burst It’s almost like only I exist. Where everything’s mine If I can keep my mouth shut tight, tight,[Read More...]
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The White Man’s High-Rises, Like Deadly Noxious Weeds, Grow Everywhere in the New World Photo: Peter Rae This Canadian writer has been married to a lovely ‘Sydney Girl’ now for some forty years and, lo, though having mostly lived those years with her abroad in Canada and the United States, has nevertheless endeavoured to return to his common-law relationship[Read More...]
Many thanks to Pablo Solón for his insightful essay on this important alternative to the catastrophic juggernaut of industrial modernity. Having spent so much of my life interacting and working with a land-based, indigenous society in a mountainous region very distant from the Andes—Ladakh, in the Trans-Himalaya—I was struck by how the philosophy of Vivir Bien, or BuenVivir as it is[Read More...]
