Can a Family Resurrect the American Chestnut Tree in Appalachia?
Virginia tree farmers reintroduce an iconic tree that was decimated by blight.
Virginia tree farmers reintroduce an iconic tree that was decimated by blight.
If we truly seek to create relations of accountability and peace with our larger environment(s), jurisprudence needs to evolve beyond our current anthropocentric lens, and we can make it so by encouraging environmental movements to collaborate in developing ecocentric governance approaches.
Working at smaller scales means that the benefits of additional crop rotations, processing mills and artisan-micro-maker labs could be spread throughout the country, bringing greater resilience and livelihoods to rural areas. Energy demands would be lower and distributed as processing would be localised and require limited transport.
If legacy organizations are structurally constrained, then we need to nurture the new actors — ones willing to fail, to iterate and to take risks that can help spark major transformations. For this reason, I believe it is worth looking in more detail at lessons we might apply from the innovator’s dilemma.
Without urgent and equitable action to fund adaptation, the next decade will not only test our infrastructure; it will test our humanity. Adaptation is not charity; it is climate justice. And justice delayed will only deepen the loss.
How would a job guarantee disenshittify the labor market? The job guarantee means a “permanent, publicly provided employment opportunity to anyone ready and willing to work, it establishes an effective floor for the entire labor market.”
Post-partisan practice is not compromise; it’s a strategy for shared survival. Perhaps the path through this civilizational turning begins with a simpler question: What does this place need, and who else shares that need?
Whatever the obstacles, the waste and pollution we have collectively spewed into the global environment in the pursuit of convenience and profit isn’t going anywhere without some form of decisive and assertive action; perhaps the mentality of into eternity is the solution which may match this challenge.
And so we arrive at the guiding question: What inner, civilizational shift will enable us to break free from deepening destructive patterns of the past and begin to co-sense and co-shape the future that is calling us now, into being?
In this episode, Nate interviews Professor Ted Parson about solar geoengineering (specifically stratospheric aerosol injection) as a potential response to severe climate risks.
The current AI moment forces us to contemplate even more profound questions: Who are we as human beings? Why are we here? What are we here for? What is ours to do?
Political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century employed a curious phrase to denote the source of wealth at the base of the economy: the “free gifts of nature.” Alyssa Battistoni, a political science professor at Barnard College, believes that careful attention to the meanings of this phrase illuminates many aspects of the world we inhabit today.