New Future

My time at QVdL reinforced everything I believe about ERC’s approach to restoration. We’re not just planting trees or improving soil – we’re building resilient communities that can adapt, learn, and scale their impact.

This manifesto is a call for constructive defiance. We cannot wait for top-down solutions. The future must be built from below—by cultivating water, restoring land, training youth, and constructing homes that regenerate rather than consume.

The great challenge, then, is to learn how to see, name, and reclaim the commons as significant forces in life – a powerful social phenomenon that is not just at play in the Global South, but everywhere.

What if the Kogi story could help all of us – anywhere in the world – be more discerning in our relative processes of acculturation, helping us distinguish what is worth holding on to , as globalization comes knocking at our door ? With the hope of finding some answers, I set off to northern Colombia, to see what I might find.

Is land – which to some cultures is the original mother, to be revered and cared for – just another commodity which can and should be exploited in the interests of human ‘progress’? Is energy another such commodity as well?

In 2016, high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—PFAS—were discovered in Monette’s drinking water well at her home in the upstate New York town of Petersburgh, along with the wells of many of her neighbors. Petersburgh’s municipal water supply was also tainted, as was the Little Hoosic River, where Monette liked to cool off. “I didn’t know I was sitting in a pool of poison, ” says Monette, a 68-year-old retired elementary school art teacher who taught at a local school district.

Crafting a story and connecting people are centrally important to successfully cultivating biodiversity, as Belgian farmer Tijs Boelens has found out in his work to integrate heritage grains into the supply chain.

In this conversation, Nate is joined by ecological economist Josh Farley to explore the persistent myths taught in business schools, and the disconnect between economic theory and reality. Building on Nate’s recent Frankly episode, they unpack topics like the misconception between value and price, how GDP is a flawed measure of well-being, the truth about debt, and the ripple effects these have across market dynamics.

With this manifesto, we are putting national governments everywhere on notice. We are not going away. We will become bolder in our local experiments and in our challenges to your authority.

Top down decisions about “national infrastructure” may save time on paper but are not a good way to make progress. It appears autocratic and shifts objectors onto the streets or into the courts. Real consultation takes time and effort. But it builds trust and leads to better outcomes.

As climate change makes flash floods and other extreme weather events more common and deadly, researchers across the country are struggling with how to effectively communicate risk to the public, without losing their trust through over-warning.

Agroecology is a science, a set of practices, and a movement that is critical to the transition to sustainable food systems.

What model could make us more resilient, more comfortable, and more likely to survive a global ecological meltdown? The answer is low-tech library socialism.

Things caused by humanity can probably also be solved by humanity. A good place to start seems to be to make sure that the risks we face are more consistently included in things like national risk assessments or global policy making, so that we can better explore what might be done about them.