Frances Coppola explores how increasing automation is fundamentally shifting the nature of work away from 'making stuff' towards personal services. One of the most interesting issues to arise in the course of the "comment-athon" on my post "The Golden Calf" was the suggestion that the link between money and work is broken, and indeed that there is no longer...
I entered engineering school at Columbia University in September of last year intent on pursuing my interest in the development of alternative energy technology. Throughout this past year, my classmates and I have been often reminded of how engineers are really public servants whose ideas, inventions, and discoveries can be powerful agents of change if the engineer is committed to them. The...
A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, produces the best for humanity. This was always a distortion of Darwin’s ideas. His 1871 book The Descent of Man...
How to reduce one’s Carbon Footprint! The choice facing humanity is described in stark terms in a prize-winning book on environment called ‘Collapse’. In this book, the author Jared Diamond describes that one way or another, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved within a generation. “The only question is whether they will be resolved in...
1. Green Worker Cooperative’s Co-op Academy?, The Bronx, N.Y. Ideas for co-ops may flourish, but few people understand exactly how to make theirs real. The Co-op Academy is providing answers. Founded four years ago by Omar Freilla (who recently made Ebony magazine’s list of the Power 100), the academy runs 16-week courses that offer intensive mentoring, legal and financial...
Yesterday, after 21 months in federal custody, climate activist Tim DeChristopher approached the pulpit at his church in Salt Lake City, Utah, as a free man. The First Unitarian congregation rose in uproarious applause, tears streaming down more than a few faces. “It’s good to be home,” DeChristopher told the crowd. During his sermon, he said that he had never expected to...
The solar era has begun: the industry is booming, prices are dropping, and solar energy at last seems poised to help topple the climate-altering dominance of fossil fuels. But bringing it to the masses won’t be as simple as just soaking up the sun. To gain a better picture of the challenges to come—and of some possible solutions—electric companies and solar developers...
Despite impressive green economic growth during this country’s job-challenged recovery, particularly in the wind energy sector, the conservative right is systematically seeking to reverse this trend by repealing state-mandated renewable energy targets, even if many of the states that stand to lose jobs and economic opportunity lean red. Right-wing groups funded by the fossil-fuel...
“There it is,” I said, camera in hand. “I’ve been looking for that poster for my ecological city slide show.” Before me was a sign I’d seen several times flashing by through the window of my moving train. It turned out to be part of a campaign by the Vancouver Aquarium. Featuring an image of a polar bear floating on a slab of ice in an almost open ocean, the...
As regular readers of this blog know, I have in previous posts commented on hunter-gatherers' playfulness ; their playful religious practices ; their playful approach toward productive work ; their non-d
An increasing foundation of scientific research shows a significant linkage between personal well being and environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviours . This is not coincidence; it is a profound truth of crucial importance in the quest to create sustainable societies. It proves beyond a doubt that sustainability has nothing to do with sacrifice and everything to do with creating a...
October 2012, Notre dames des Landes, France -- Chris leans forward, her long fingers play with the dial of the car radio “I’m trying to find 107.7 FM“ … a burst of Classical music, a fragment of cheesy pop. “ Ah! Here we go! I think I’ve got it?” The plastic pitch of a corporate jingle pierces the speakers: “Radio Vinci Autoroute: This is the...
Patrick Crouch practices the kind of gardening that Detroit has recently become famous for. The typical plot at Earthworks Urban Farm , where he serves as program manager, is cultivated on borrowed land and in close proximity to houses and apartment buildings. These plots provide local food to neighbors through CSAs, and help neighborhood kids get acquainted with agriculture. Activists...
Discussions on energy in general are relevant for two reasons: first, most of us not only just use energy but we also recognise its absolutely indispensable role to allow us to function in our routines, assure the continuation of the economic systems we rely upon, and to put simply to allow for the survival of mankind; second, we finally have come to accept that energy sources and supply...
The organic farming industry is booming. Since the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched its federal organic certification program in 2002, the number of organic farms has more than doubled. U.S. organic food sales have also grown from $1 billion in 1990 to $31.5 billion in 2011, according to the Organic Trade Association . To help ensure that consumers get what they generally pay...
From elephant to estuary: does the 2013 European Green Capital have something to teach US cities?
2012 was another big year for break-out films in the social change genre. With most of the bases covered for all of the major problems we're facing, more and more films this year focused on the solutions side of the equation, giving a voice to the uplifting stories of people working to realize their dreams of a thriving, sustainable world. For the films that focused on the...
My ecological journey started in the forests of the Himalaya. My father was a forest conservator, and my mother became a farmer after fleeing the tragic partition of India and Pakistan. It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology. The songs and poems our mother composed for us were about trees, forests, and India’s forest...
A bold new threat to the economic status quo brings on a press blackout. Social pain, anger at ecological degradation and the inability of traditional politics to address deep economic failings has fueled an extraordinary amount of practical on-the-ground institutional experimentation and innovation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders in communities around the...
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Emmanuel of Oakland, California, responded when asked about carrying a reusable shopping bag. “It looks like a man-purse.” 1 Emmanuel was part of a recent OgilvyEarth study entitled, Mainstream Green: Moving Sustainability from Niche to Normal , which investigated the discrepancy between Americans’ actions and intentions...
If indigenous and modern world views are going to inform each other to shift the trajectory of humankind toward a just, thriving, and sustainable future , an important step in this direction is for the modern world to better understand indigenous peoples’ stories, perceptions, and values. In the past, indigenous peoples’ perspectives have too frequently been told by outsiders...
We know that television's numbing effect is an unhealthy side-effect of our modern world, however Jenny Nazak argues that we individually have the power to incite people to goodness using the bounty of multimedia platforms available to each and every one of us
In Brief : There will be at least 100 million more Americans by 2050, and likely 150 million more. Yet the cities that will house them are so spatially and economically unstable that it is impossible to do much beyond superficial sustainability planning. One solution is to anchor and recycle wealth in communities, using locally owned businesses as bulwarks against uncontrolled economic forces...
For those of you who are curious exactly how Richard Register's ideas would work in practice, here's what it could look like if Americans ever decided to retrofit their downtowns for true sustainability. We know how to build the ecocity. It's easy if you want to: up-zone for more density and diversity in the centers and withdraw from sprawl. We are replete with tools. The starting...
Imagine a world in which all the things we make, use, and consume provide nutrition for nature and industry—a world in which growth is good and human activity generates a delightful, restorative ecological footprint. While this may seem like heresy to many in the world of sustainable development, the destructive qualities of today’s cradle-to-grave industrial system can be seen...
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? These are the questions that the artist Paul Gaugin wrote in the corner of one of his paintings when he was living in Tahiti in 1897, and they’ve been asked by thinking people for as long as we’ve been thinking – especially today, when there’s a solid case to be made from the ecological evidence that our...
The universe ultimately runs on an energy economy, not a market economy as the dominant economic ideology claims. Ecological damage is tied to energy use of any kind in our peculiar type of economy where the operating rules of the system require maximization of profits at any cost. Unrestrained profit maximization in turn impels the conversion of energy and raw materials into garbage as fast...
Five million people die every year as a result of the carbon economy and the impacts of climate change, according to the latest edition of DARA’s Climate Vulnerability Monitor. Published today, the report warns this could rise to six million by 2030, with 700,000 of those deaths from climate change related impacts. It estimates 100 million people could die as a result of climate-carbon...
It speaks the language of riffles and babbles, not legal rights and codes, but the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s third largest, has received something no other river in the country – and possibly the world – yet has: a legal voice. In a framework agreement signed last week between the Crown and the Whanganui River iwi (the local Maori people), the river will be...
Agenda 21: It’s the biggest threat to your freedom, and unless you regularly attend yahoo-filled local planning and zoning meetings , you’ve probably never even heard of it. Until recently, this 20-year-old United Nations plan to promote “sustainable development” was known only to stalwart defenders of Liberty and Freedom like the John Birch Society. But the...
Over many years as an activist, attorney and artist working on environmental campaigns, Chris Desser began to wonder about the sensual pleasures that will disappear from our lives as more and more species go extinct. That was the genesis of her “Catalog of Extinct Experience”— a multimedia installation at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center planned for the Fall of 2013...
My aim in this essay is to explore the history of the terms sustainable and sustainability , and their various published definitions, and then to offer a set of five axioms (based on a review of the literature) to help clarify the characteristics of a durable society. The essence of the term sustainable is simple enough: “that which can be maintained over time.” By...
Take a look at this info-graphic. And then this one . The disparity is absurd. Though personally I don't think raising the minimum wage is the solution, as it doesn't get anywhere close to solving the root problem.
SolidarityNYC is a New York City-based group which works to create links between social movements and the "solidarity economy." The latter consists of cooperatives, small businesses, non-profits and other economic activities which "reinforce values of justice, ecological sustainability, cooperation, and democracy." The group aims to promote the solidarity economy as an alternative to the...
Film offers us a powerful tool to shift awareness and inspire action. By hosting community film screenings and sharing them online, they offer a method to break our dependence on the mainstream media and become the media ourselves. We don't need to wait for anyone or anything. Just imagine what could become possible if an entire city had seen just one of the documentaries below. Just imagine...
It’s time we put economics into some sort of physical scientific context that makes sense. Economists have drifted off into a disconnected world where, blinded by massive amounts of money and mystery, they see themselves as a kind of high priesthood calling the shots for practically everything, then saying they were blindsided by the debacle in the real estate world and the up-trading in...
Neoclassical economics has severe flaws. But since the field is captive to the monopolistic money and banking system, it is very difficult for economists who are aware of this to speak up. If they were to speak about the flaws, their careers would be severely limited. Only the most narrow economists who reinforce the status quo of the debt-based monetary system get rewarded. But they are...
REMIX : To combine or edit existing materials to produce something new. If you’ve seen it, you’ll probably have guessed that here at The Crisis of Civilization we love Remix films – and we want you to have a go too. We would like to invite you to create your own Crisis of Civilization -style sequences, using unused interview audio of Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed with images...
New laws took effect in Vermont and Virginia [July 11, 2011], giving ethical business a boost. If Vermont's law had been around 11 years ago, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield might not have had to sell their ice cream company. Back then, Unilever made the highest bid for Ben and Jerry's, so the laws of shareholder responsibility forced the hippie founders to sell, even though they wanted to...
2011 will likely be remembered in America as the year that the nation's youth finally started to wake up - all that bubbling knowledge of the world's problems, all the discontent and disillusion with our broken system finally burst into a flurry of creative action. Our understandings of the deep, structural flaws in our economy, politics and culture reached new heights of collective awareness...
It's been five years since the Films For Action project began in Lawrence, Kansas. It started with one simple idea: we can't depend on the mainstream media to inform us, so let's become the media ourselves by hosting documentaries on issues that the corporate media ignores. Over the years we 've hosted over 30 film screenings, launched a website that has attracted over 380,000...
CREATING COMMUNITY: (Above) Chris O’Donnell, 24, of Bushwick, Brooklyn, takes a break at the Occupy Wall Street encampment. The kitchen has been serving free meals to as many as 1,000 people a day. (Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales) “Who is ready to defend our park?” the speaker shouted. It was 6 a.m. and thousands of us filled the Occupy Wall Street camp under a...
I wrote this originally in 2010, and, it is based on decades of work by some of our best. Our scientists do not get credence from media. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/publications/annrpt25/Manning.pdf This document is pages 121 to 126 of a longer set of data about our monitoring of our Homeworld, and specifically, the composition of our air, or, atmosphere. Unlike the countless tens and...
“You say laughter and I say larfter,” sang Louis Armstrong. The difference is subtle. Across the world, however, from the Amazon to the Arctic, tribal peoples say it in 4,000 entirely different ways. Sadly, no one now says “laughter” in Eyak, a language from the Gulf of Alaska, whose last fluent speaker died in 2008, or in the Bo language from the Andaman Islands, for...
This series will attempt to roughly give some examples as to how the urban environment can be altered so that cities can not only sustain themselves but also become ecologically rich environs benefiting mankind and servicing nature. In order for us to do so, we must create radical shifts in the way we think about the vital needs of our civilization and follow the examples biology can give us...
There’s no doubt that the U.S. culture is famous for its promises of happiness. As age-old as the idea of the “American dream” is the idea that working hard and making money to create the life you want will lead you to happiness and bliss. It’s made painfully obvious in movies, TV shows, billboards and ads everyday: The best way to find happiness today, at this moment...
Frack! tells the story of the unconventional gas-drilling ("fracking") frenzy sweeping the Marcellus region, including the Catskills and Upper Delaware River watershed, threatening pristine areas which provide clean drinking water for over 15 million people. Without a massive public outcry, once idyllic rural landscapes could become toxic industrial wastelands, and New York State a gas...
As a sustainability-loving transportation planner, I was thrilled to learn that Dr. Kee Yeon Hwang would be visiting Vancouver and talking about the project that has made Seoul, Korea a legend in urban planning circles: the Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project .
Very, very few people can ever say that they are in the single most important place they could possibly be, doing the single most important thing they could possibly be doing -- that's you, here, now. You are the movement that we need if we are going to win in the few years that we have. You have the skills now, you are making the connections, and there is no one else. It is you. That is a...
Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry. The country, which has been pilloried by the...