Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What does a livable future look like 100 years from now? If we unlocked unlimited green energy, what would we actually do with it? And are our dreams of a renewable-energy utopia sometimes just as delusional as the fossil-fueled ‘drill baby drill’ mentality?
If we unlocked unlimited green energy, what would we actually do with it? And are our dreams of a renewable-energy utopia sometimes just as delusional as the old fossil-fueled, drill-baby-drill mentality? Alex Leff of the Human Nature Odyssey podcast hosts this special Crazy Town highlights compilation.
There’s the book club, the Rotary Club, the Mickey Mouse Club, and the club sandwich. Whatever your preference, you might want to think about joining a club. Social clubs, fraternal orders, and the like have had a storied and critical role in public life.
Fressoz’s book deals primarily with the creation of myths about energy futures; Becker’s with the creation of myths about futures in space. They overlap in their consideration of why such myths are created. Who pays for them to be created; who benefits from their creation?
Community-scale and bioregional-scale responses to the Great Unraveling invite personal action and lead both to convivial social arrangements and to the discovery of ways to live more in cooperation with, less in domination of, the web of life.
Frog and Toad Are Friends, at least according to a venerable children’s book. And so are Jason (Crazy Town’s resident biology nerd) and conservationist brothers, Kyle and Trevor Ritland, authors of The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species.
A horrific zombie apocalypse has ravaged the world—but hardly anyone seems to notice. One lone podcaster sets out to document this strange new reality: from mindful zombie retreats, to those fortifying shotgun bunkers, to others disappearing into the woods to build something entirely new.
Some key understandings in Crazy Town: the Earth is finite; the economy cannot grow forever; people can harm ecosystems and cause global warming; physics, chemistry, and biology are real; inequality hurts everyone; healthy humans need community, and it’s more fun to laugh than to cry. But where did principles like these originate?
The Caatinga’s story isn’t one of survival in a dryland ecosystem – it’s a lesson of looking for the hidden patterns, finding alliances, and being patient. Well, and about fate of course. Because, if a forgotten biome can regrow from dust, what else might be possible?
If collective survival is possible, there will be a lot of work ahead. We’ll be more effective in that work if we’re unburdened by hate and recrimination, and are instead rooted in gratitude for life, nature, and community.
Chris Smaje openly admits that there are too many contingent variables to predict the future; many scenarios are plausible. That said, Finding Lights in a Dark Age offers some thoughtful, erudite speculation about what a healthy, post-capitalist world might look like and the choices we may need to make.
Chuck Collins returns to Crazy Town to offer insights from his new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.
