Economics 101 and Ecological Collapse
“The collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.” – David Attenborough Today’s economics, especially Economics 101, is a major source of humankind’s...
View ArticleLocal 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...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleVariety, Survival, and the Revenge of the Luddites
Since human creativity will have to move in new directions as the Industrial Revolution runs down, you may be wondering what kinds of technology are suited to a sane life. You may picture what is...
View ArticleLand 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...
View ArticleWhat is ‘Energy Denial’?
Wind turbine blades at a Wyoming landfill. 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...
View ArticleResist Globally, Renew Locally
A recent discussion forum among the members of The Great Transition Network focused on “The Promise and Pitfalls of Localism.” My friend and colleague Brian Tokar started the discussion by noting that...
View ArticleStep 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...
View ArticleThe Real Economy
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...
View ArticleDisaster localization: a constructive response to climate chaos
The moment I first learned about climate change will always stick in my mind. A seventh-grade ecology class led to a conversation between girls after school about what, back then, was being called...
View ArticleThinking Outside the Grid
Thirty years ago, a friend of mine published a book called 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save The Earth. It described the huge environmental benefits that would result if everyone made some simple...
View ArticleDammed Good Questions about the Green New Deal
Hydroelectric power from dams might be the thorniest issue that proponents of the Green New Deal (GND) have to grapple with. Providing more energy than solar and wind combined, dams could well become...
View ArticleWe Can’t Do It Ourselves
How to live a more sustainable life? This question generates a lot of debate that is focused on what individuals can do in order to address problems like climate change. For example, people are...
View ArticleMy Year Without Industrial Food
For the last year I grew and foraged 100% of my food. No grocery stores, no restaurants, not even a drink at a bar. Nature was my garden, my pantry and my pharmacy. Most people would imagine I live in...
View ArticleThe Key to the Environmental Crisis is Beneath Our Feet
The Green New Deal resolution that was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives in February hit a wall in the Senate, where it was called unrealistic and unaffordable. In a Washington Post...
View ArticleIowa, Pseudo-Events, and Hyperreality
The Iowa caucus affair last night was a masterclass in hyperreality. The relevant facts are as follows. It was the long-anticipated kickoff to the primary season in an ever-expanding election cycle...
View ArticleWhat if we only ate food from local farms?
“We would die from starvation. It’s that simple.” Or so TV botanist James Wong recently tweeted in response to the title question, taken from a BBC feature. In this post I’m going to make the case that...
View ArticleThe Folly of Farm-Free Food
“Beware of simple solutions to complex problems. That is a crucial lesson from history; a lesson that intelligent people in every age keep failing to learn.”[1] Having wisely counseled thus just 5...
View Article5 ways coronavirus could help humanity survive the ecological crisis
The human tragedy of the coronavirus is immense. Thousands have died, hundreds of thousands have been infected globally, and millions more have been affected. Whilst infectious disease has always been...
View ArticleNot Giving up on Happiness: Care of the Self and Well-Being in a Plague Year
The specter of plague haunts our world, and it brings with it not only the ghouls of disease and death but vast economic and social uncertainty of a sort only the most elderly among us remembers (the...
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