Author: Resilience.org

What we are witnessing as a result of this pandemic is a widespread challenge to metastable systems upon which our societies depend. The most obvious are those related to hospitals and health care products. We often read in the news that hospitals are near “the breaking point” as if the hospital walls will burst when … Continue reading “Cracks in the supply chain: Is metastable turning into unstable?”

The Resilience.org editorial team are taking a short break from 13-14 July. Regular posting will resume on Wednesday 15 July.

Tribal leaders and constituents across Lakota Territory and elsewhere welcomed a hard-won court order on July 6 to shut off the oil flow in the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) within 30 days.

Back in March, I wrote that the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic would likely shape its economic, political, and geopolitical fortunes for years or decades to come. Four months later, it’s time for a check-in. How’s that pandemic response going? … Keep an eye on that snow-covered mountainside.

Heather Cox Richardson addresses the question of What Could Possibly Go Right? with a political focus in her conversation with host Vicki Robin.

Activist Tim DeChristopher presents his views on our big question with themes of identity, capitalism and mortality.

In today’s episode, Severn Cullis-Suzuki gives her perspective that spans from addressing the UN at age 12 through to her life-long activism for environment and indigenous rights.

Municipalist syndicalism broadly means democratizing unions as a means to democratizing local and regional public power. This is done through advancing an anti-racist dual power agenda for the labor movement by building and acting with communities of color on issues beyond the job.

Winning the election may be the easiest task Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have to accomplish over the next several years. Governing, however, is another matter. In both cases, climate policy has a prominent role to play. Will a President Biden be able to do what Obama didn’t—put the nation on a path to sustainability?

In my humble opinion, if these are our goals, we must get used to and comfortable with people being in dedicated, committed, and prolonged uprising. In fact, I believe that’s what this “new normal” is, and I hope that these protests go well into November and beyond until we see accountability and real, tangible actions … Continue reading “Prolonged Uprising is the New Normal”

I like the idea of living within the rain budget of my area, which isn’t too hard because we usually get too much. I like the idea of having irrigation water even if I lost access to my local water utility for some reason (power outage, income outage, anything).

Critique has been the subject of volumes of philosophical and scholarly work, so my purpose here is to consider some aspects of a critique that is congruent with the philosophy and practice of Enough, and putting care at the centre of all our decision-making.

We are living in a moment of tectonic shift in society. Something changed when we all watched the same images — 8 minutes and 46 seconds — the killing of George Floyd. During that unbearable experience, something broke down and broke open in our hearts, in how we relate to one another, and in how … Continue reading “Turning Toward Our Blind Spot: Seeing the Shadow as a Source for Transformation”

We can end poverty, right now, without any additional aggregate economic growth at all. The key here is to recognize that we don’t live in a poor world. On the contrary, we live in an incredibly rich world. Global poverty is a product not of any actual scarcity, but rather of the systematic creation of artificial scarcity.

I passionately believe in the concept of Community Supported Agriculture. I wanted to do it again, but this time, with real, genuine community involvement. Only where were we going to start?

This week Congressional Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives put forward policies, including passing a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill on July 1, aimed at cleaning up the number one source of carbon pollution in America — the transportation sector.

The impact of coronavirus will be huge. But it is not yet the crisis that could push our global society into the phase change required for the Great Transition.

There are significant parallels between the response to the COVID-19 contagion and what the nation must do to combat and adapt to Earth’s warming. In both cases, national science-based policies must be put in place to address the considerable threats posed by each.

If there is one thing a virus cannot kill, it is a rebellion. Nevertheless, there is no way to begin this collection of essays on Extinction Rebellion, at this time, other than by acknowledging the remarkable, mind-bending moment at which these words are written.

This new handbook is an indispensable guide to climate activists and policy-makers alike towards a complete overhaul of the financial system to stop climate chaos.

On the back of her research, Krause-Jensen is optimistic about the carbon sequestration potential of kelp and the possibility that it could be dramatically enlarged by sustainable farming.

Crude hit four-month highs on Thursday, aided by a tightening market and a better-than-expected US jobs report. The caveat is that the jobs survey took place before the latest Covid-19 wave and the associated business closures.

In his anthology An Archdruid’s Tales, Greer seeks to use fiction, together with a few nonfiction forays into future scenarios, as a means of painting a more accurate picture of what lies ahead for industrial civilization.

Imagine a process in which food and farming policies were designed with social justice as the central tenet. What would such a process look like? Whose voices would be heard, and whose interests would be represented? What questions would need to be asked and how would we know that social justice had been addressed?

The Cuban system demonstrates a sustainable model of medical care, providing a high level of service with low use of resources. Many greens think only in terms of reducing personal consumption, or hoping for technical advances that will enable continued affluence. Too few realise that there have to be radical changes in systems as well … Continue reading “Summary and review of “Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution””

In this episode Dr. Susanne Moser brings her work’s emphasis on climate change adaptation to the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”

In this episode Food Revolution Network Co-Founder Ocean Robbins shares his vision and recent observations of our world.

In this episode Vicki talks to Young Women Empowered’s Victoria Santos. Victoria approached our big question with a focus on social justice and racial equity.

The concluding episode in our series, Seeing White. An exploration of solutions and responses to America’s deep history of white supremacy by host John Biewen, with Chenjerai Kumanyika, Robin DiAngelo, and William “Sandy” Darity, Jr.

Positive Money is to be commended for its efforts in helping to bring the deep and systemic problem of Economic Growth to the public eye. However, while agreeing with this broad orientation, it is worth taking a close look at the report’s policy proposals and at the economic theory behind them.

As we find ourselves with a set of challenges and opportunities wildly different than what any of us could have predicted, common sense demands that the climate movement be as adaptable, humble, and intersectional as it is rebellious.

The reduction in travel during the pandemic and people’s willingness to find simple pleasures closer to home bode well for the ‘staycation’ – holidaying at home or in the home country – and for reducing carbon emissions.

I am firmly of the land sharing community. I take the view that if we are to reverse the relentless decline of biodiversity and natural ecosystems, which I was fortunate enough to witness in abundance as a child before major agricultural intensification took place, we need to change the way we farm.

The decisions made during the remainder of this year – a mere 6 months – to recover economically from the COVID-19 crisis, are likely to determine the practical actions set in motion for the next 3 years, in terms of controlling carbon emissions, and thence the course of the climate crisis up to 2050… and beyond.

Enter #WeAreLocals, a platform to deliver a sense of place for local businesses to showcase their products and services to the local community and beyond. A virtual high street that, in essence, will help ensure that—when you are able to go more freely to your local high street or town centre in the future—there’s still … Continue reading “We Believe in High Streets”

So, it comes down to this. The answer to these crazy times, is to evacuate & de-spend the enclosures and to inhabit and re-spend the skill, ingenuity, sensuality (intelligence gathering) and moral probity of the common.

The aim of the Sundial is to act as a heuristic or design tool for how we might set out, intentionally and skilfully, to rebuild the imaginative capacity of people, organisations or nations. Underpinning this is the belief, as set out in ‘From What Is to What If’ that we are living in a time … Continue reading “Introducing the Imagination Sundial”

Is economic growth compatible with ecological sustainability? To answer this question, we need to talk about decoupling. The term ‘decoupling’ refers to the possibility of detaching economic growth from environmental pressures.

Adrian Ayres Fisher, Sustainability Coordinator for Triton College in River Grove, Illinois explains how an easy change in gardening practice can remove carbon dioxide gas from the atmosphere and help mitigate global warming.

When it comes to U.S. government programs and support earmarked for the benefit of particular racial groups, history is clear. White folks have received most of the goodies.

Perhaps more than any other topic, climate change has been subject to the organised spread of spurious information. This circulates online and frequently ends up being discussed in established media or by people in the public eye.

Ecommunitarianism is based on three basic ethical standards logically deduced from the question that Ethics sets out, that is to say, What should I do?

Now is the time to build a new, more humane, more robust food system on the ruins of the one that has failed us. This nation can have an ample, nutritious food supply without exploiting and endangering the people who produce and process it.

The urgency with which many white people are calling for racial justice in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Dominique Rem’mie Fells, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and so many others embodies a critical paradox: how can whites work against racism while also ensuring that we don’t re-center white supremacy … Continue reading “White Urgency to End Racism: Why Now?”

The Arctic heat wave that sent Siberian temperatures soaring to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit on the first day of summer put an exclamation point on an astonishing transformation of the Arctic environment that’s been underway for about 30 years.

Oil posted its second weekly loss for the month as a surge in US coronavirus cases casts doubts on the market’s prospects for recovery. New York futures closed at $38 and London at $41 on Friday.

Far from saving the whales, it was oil that nearly obliterated them, and may yet still do so. The real lessons to be drawn from the history of whaling are more interesting and more complex than the oil salvation narrative.

In our new report, White Supremacy is the Pre-existing Condition, we found that the concentration of wealth has surged during the pandemic, further exacerbating an already extreme racial wealth divide.

As long as we think of COVID-19 as simply an implacable foe that must be vanquished, it is unlikely that we will learn to live with it or to deal effectively with the next pandemic.

That we have begun to confuse understanding with outsourced expertise is not a surprise. The apps are merely the latest indicator of our disconnect from the natural world.