New Future

Maximize profits, exploit nature, hoard money, and, like Buzz Lightyear, grow the economy to infinity and beyond! That’s the modern economic playbook. But for decades, one renegade country has taken a contrarian stance that actually cares about people’s wellbeing and environmental health: the Himalayan nation of Bhutan.

The forest ecosystem has so much to teach us. We envision a new kind of philanthropy that learns from and mirrors its interconnected resilience.

How we create knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself. This is the message of this week’s guest, Aboriginal scholar and author, Tyson Yunkaporta. In his explanation of the importance of learning through living, and living with learning, Tyson points to the how the discourse around decolonisation has granted expertise based on identity rather than experience.

If you are on the permaculture train, I applaud you, it’s a great ride, but I also invite you to look around and ask: where is it really going? Is it fostering collective care and ecological reciprocity, or is it just another form of “green” entrepreneurship? Has it challenged the dominant system or capitalist materialism? Or has it merely carved out a comfortable niche within it?

I have hauled a lot of buckets of water across the street, trying to make up for the less than 1.5″ of rain in my rain gauge for all of August. For comparison, my town’s August average is 3.5″, and in the last two years my gauge has seen over 9″ — both prior Augusts following on July floods, whereas this year July barely hit average precipitation.

Whether or not one agrees with Tweed’s definition of religion, his choice to begin his story in ancient Texas toward the end of the last Ice Age in North America, rather than New England or Jamestown in the 1600s, is the first of many refreshing narrative twists about who belongs in American religious history and what should count as religion.

Drawing down carbon from the air and stashing it in underground rock formations has been framed as an essential way to slow and reverse global warming. But new research published Wednesday in the journal Nature finds there are far fewer suitable places to do this than previously thought.

Impasse succeeds in its aim of candidly assessing our planetary predicament and offering a realistic, ethical way forward. Its achievement lies not in offering solutions—since Scranton persuasively argues that none exist—but in clarifying the nature of the bind we are in and offering a way to live meaningfully within it.

In this week’s Frankly, Nate weighs the value of a pound of gold with other things that we derive worth from in our lives – from dollars and bitcoin to…less pecuniary markers.

Can preparing for war really keep the peace?

We rejoin Herman Daly in the late 1970s - a tumultuous time for our renegade economist. His so-called "radical" critiques of endless growth - and his insistence that the economy must operate within the Earth’s limits - left him isolated in his field and at odds with colleagues. Yet, from this difficult period emerged a new vision of economics.

What and where are the grassroots movements and alternative visions that challenge green colonialism and offer ‘ecosocial transition’ pathways toward equitable and ecological futures? This question is at the heart of ‘The Geopolitics of Green Colonialism: Global Justice and Ecosocial Transitions’, an open access book which critiques the promoted solutions to the climate polycrisis while also exploring alternatives.

Once again, wild horses chase each other. Taurus cattle, stand-ins for aurochs, rip up the dirt with their horns. Soon, with luck, lynx will haunt the forests and flocks of vultures will circle. We can’t return to the past, but we can rewild.

On this Reality Roundtable, Nate is joined by Heather Cooley, Zach Weiss, and Mike Joy to discuss the importance of water and hydrology and the complex ways they impact our planet.