Amsterdam is shifting to “Donut Economics”. Kate Raworth developed a “donut-shaped economic model” as a substitute for the traditional models of growth-driven economies. Watch below:
What do you think about this sea change in the economic model that the human community has traditionally embraced (growth-based economy)? An economy based on an Earth-sustaining economy that is equitable as well as prosperous? Learn more here.
Here is a slide deck from a presentation with Kate Raworth and Hazel Henderson during a discussion sponsored by the Security and Sustainability Forum:
8-5-21 Update: Just watched this YouTube interview of the author by the Post Carbon Institute program, What Could Possibly Go Right?
Kim Stanley Robinson’s new speculative fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, is revelatory. The breadth of imagination, depth of scholarship on climate change science, and international movements to organize nations to respond to it–plus a complex plot and range of characters–I finish reading each chapter with renewed awe. That includes the one-page, sometimes one paragraph, chapters with a voice for the market, history, and even a carbon atom. With each of these unique stopping points, the author offers us an invitation to rethink our place in the whole huge planetary system, or how we make history, or the long, long arm of time in which we are but a flash.
The Ministry for the Future is an agency created at The United Nations Conference of the Parties in 2024 to operate independently to protect the futures of unborn generations and all the living plants and animals without a voice to advocate for the future. [For reference the upcoming Conference of the Parties (COP) is scheduled for Glasgow in November. It is COP26. I am currently reading the book during COP48 (2043).]
The novel is contemporary and that makes it relevant. Robinson is charting the possible course of humanity over the next couple decades. That makes it a page-turner. The author delves into the monetary system, global movements in Africa, Europe, and smaller island nations. Shit happens as the saying goes. Each time there is breakdown of a system or a climate catastrophe, or millions of people who refuse to repay their student loans, possibilities open up or, there is at least a potentiation for something good. Sometimes several things, like a market crash coupled with political movements in Africa, and climate imperatives result in a shift in the global mind so that people opposed to certain ideas now consider them. It moves like a train without a conductor but its path seems sure. And we are all passengers (human and nonhuman) and collectively our presence, thoughts and actions are steering it.
The first line in the book. “It was getting hotter.”
It’s probably unwise to review a book while still reading it, but folks, I think it is so important that I needed to stop reading to alert you, and to beg you to read it. Then we should talk!
Scroll to the bottom of this page for the YouTube video review of The Ministry by the Bioneers. Or link here.
As a novelist who writes climate change stories, I try to show characters who are experiencing the impacts of climate disturbance. The forces that impact people are multifaceted, ranging from emotional to economic to physical. I feel it my duty as a writer to also suggest solutions and to empower characters who represent communities that traditionally are affected disproportionately. See my 2016 novel, Threshold.
High Country News conducted an interesting project in 2019 from the premise that speculative journalism could potentially accomplish more than strict fact-based journalism has not been able to accomplish. Read this article below included here with permission from High Country News.
The case for speculative journalism Climate fiction can help us imagine the impacts of climate change in a way that science journalism can’t. Brian Calvert | Aug. 19, 2019 | From the print edition of High Country News
In June 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before a congressional committee, where he announced, with 99% certainty, that human-caused global warming was real. A year later, the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group formed by fossil fuel companies, began a determined effort to stymie climate action. Hansen, being a scientist, based his testimony on scientific fact. The GCC lobbyists, being slimeballs, based their efforts on telling stories — including, incredibly, the 1992 release of a video claiming that adding CO2 to the atmosphere would boost crop yields and end world hunger.
Thirty years later, we are still fighting stories with facts, and the results have been underwhelming. While it is easy to get frustrated by this state of affairs, it is also easy to understand why it’s happening. Global warming is a human-caused phenomenon that exceeds the human capacity for understanding. The typical institutions that we rely on to guide government policy — science and journalism — have not been fully up to the task. We know this at HCN because we cover, over and again, a changing climate. The facts are there, and the problem is still there — and getting worse. So last December, when the U.S. government issued a damning, detailed assessment on the climate, even we were at a loss with what to do with it. How, we wondered, can we help people understand the importance of all these facts, if the facts aren’t enough to speak for themselves?
One possible answer is this issue, a departure from our usual rigorous, fact-based journalism, and a foray into the world of imagination. Call it science fiction, or, if you prefer, speculative journalism. We took the projections of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, interviewed scientists, pored over studies — then imagined what the West would look like 50 years from the release of the report.
The result is a multiverse of future Wests, all set in the year 2068. No two stories take place in the same reality, but each is a reflection of possibilities presented in the climate assessment. In some, the West verges on satirical catastrophe. In others, technology steps up as reality melts away. Some of us imagined a better world; others imagined how much worse things might get. Readers weighed in, too. Taken together, we hope these stories inspire further exploration of the national climate assessment, which is available online and is an impressive body of work. For our hardcore readers, we’ve provided a citations page, where more information on the relevant science and studies can be found.
None of these stories are true, but any of them could be. The fact is, we don’t really know what climate chaos will bring … but we do know that enormous challenges — and opportunities — lie ahead. Our chance to change the future is now, but we’ll need a better story first.
Poring through all of this peer-reviewed scientific literature wasn’t easy. Luckily, the writers in this issue were aided by countless experts, including climate scientists, rangeland ecologists, hydrologists and others, who helped us interpret climate models and clearly imagine these many possible future Wests. See references to scientific research each piece was based on at the end of the story.
Onpoint, NPR, broadcast and interviewed three scholars to discuss the state of American democracy. Go here to listen. It is worth listening more than once. During the discussion, Americans contributed their thoughts to the discussion. These are very insightful and encouraging in terms of action and belief in our democratic way of life.
On the Onpoint site there are other resources to continue reading and listening to scholars who have deep understanding of what comprises a democracy, our current situation. Let’s start a discussion here. Please post your thoughts.
All he wanted was to learn to fly. He was a teenager in rural Tennessee, inspired by the heroic flights of the Wright Brothers and then Lindbergh, Dad worked in a little village of Watauga and saved to take flying lessons in near by Johnson City. Soaring over the green hills, he then was seized with a huge desire to leave the poverty and inward directed community of his youth to see the world, to break free.
He had a wonderful mind for math and science, eventually graduating with a degree in physics from East Tennessee State College (his mother walked the graduation stage for him as the US colleges awarded a full degree to all the men and women serving in the military in WWII in their last year of college but not able to finish due to the war).
Dad joined the Army Air Corps when Pearl Harbor was bombed. All the country kids who had not made entry into the military were now able to join up as the USA took everyone willing. Most of the rural kids did not have the best of health, having suffered as children through the Depression, a time my Dad recalled as being hungry all the time. America’s poor citizens comprised a good half of the country back then. Farmers all.
He became a bomber pilot, Captain of a B-29 crew, which he ably led through terrible, death defying excursions in the Pacific, flying over Saipan and Tokyo on bombing raids. His crew included men as young as 19. Dad told many stories from this period of his life, naturally, as it remained the most dramatic of the remaining 75 years (he lived to 95 in reasonably good health to the end).
I think of him every Memorial Day since he passed in 2012 on Pearl Harbor Day ironically. To the end, he worried he’d not be forgiven for killing people on those low level bombing raids. “We could smell flesh burning, Susan!” he recalled often.
The men and women who serve in the nation’s military carry the burden of killing, of maiming in the name of us. We must always remember that what we ask them to do in defense of our way of life is very serious and has life long consequences for them. Honor your war heroes, and let us never forget them and their devotion to the cause of America.
The legacy of the Peacemaker [the man credited with bringing the Iroquois Nations together under a Pax Iroquois] is best illustrated in his concept of The Good Mind. The Peacemaker believed that a healthy mind naturally seeks peace and that a nation of individuals using reason and harboring good will in their hearts can not only establish peace in the worst circumstances but maintain it forever.
At the time the Peacemaker was born, the region was beset by wars among the five tribes (Onandaga, Mohawk, Huron, Seneca, and Cayuga). In some areas the hatred ran so deep that individual warriors practiced cannibalism on their enemies. These dark times were at least 1,000 years before the Europeans arrived in what is now New York State.
There are noteworthy circumstances surrounding the Peacemaker. First, his grandmother had a dream that a great man would be born who would save the tribes from utter destruction. He was recognized as a youth for his exceptional qualities of mind as someone who would become a leader. But he had a problem—a speech impediment (stuttering)—which later required the assistance of the great Iroquois orator, Hiawatha, to help him accomplish his mission to bring the tribes of his nation together under the Great Tree of Peace—the democracy of constitutional laws and principles that exist to this day.
When I began studying with my teachers in Yuma, Arizona (see previous blog post, The First American Democracy) I was completely unaware of this body of law, the Iroquois legacy of which some passed into the U.S. Constitution, nor was I aware that the Iroquois Confederacy had maintained peaceful coexistence for 750 years before the founding of the fledgling American democracy.
The most important lesson of my four years of study was the reading of Basic Call to Consciousness, written as an address to Western civilization in the 1970’s when the Iroquois were still under threat and domination by the powers that be: the Canadian government and New York State legislature. Basic Call is still relevant in its astute analysis of the values that drive Western societies and how they lead to the destruction of the very basis of life.
In Basic Call to Consciousness Americans have a useful guidebook on how to strengthen our own democracy by broadening our bill of rights to include the natural world and all the life in it as sacred because, everything emanates from our common Creator. Practically, the document gave the early constitutional authors further reason to formulate a bicameral congress and institute a process of checks and balances. For example, the Peacemaker charged the women of the tribe to act as arbiters of peace by choosing the male leaders and representatives and removing them should their thoughts and actions stray from the sacred purpose of the Great Law.
I remember being shocked to find this gem of a small book in whose pages lay all the wisdom needed to solve entrenched political, economic, and relational problems here and abroad. But I realized the document was politically dangerous in the U.S. precisely because it would prevent greed and avarice from being the dominant drivers in our social and cultural enterprises. In fact, when my teachers suggested I read it, the book was out of print and hard to find. But I eventually did find a used copy at the Bohdi Tree bookstore in Los Angeles. It was considered an occult book and probably still is by a society that relegates any true challenge to its economic values as dangerous and suspect.
Today you can find Basic Call to Consciousness on Bookshop.com to support independent book stores. I consider that progress!
I’ve been reaching outside the U.S. for models of policing in countries with long-standing troubles related to justice and peace. Troubles related to putting one group above another. One source which I have featured on this blog for the past several posts is Ireland’s Peace and Reconciliation movement. I’ve posted about the Corrymella Community which is the oldest Peace and Reconciliation movement in Ireland. See precious recent posts, video and audio links on the sidebars and in posts.
Today I am summarizing the wisdom of Peter Sheridan whose leadership on policing is particularly relevant to the U.S. police brutality against the African American community. Groups have called for a whole new approach to police culture in the U.S. Sheridan’s approach is important.
Two Central Ideas First: 1) The lens of justice is too narrow because you can never adjudicate the atrocities of the past adequately. There is a subtlety to the notion of justice, Sheridan advises. What justice looks like is not straight forward. Acknowledgement of the other’s view and experience, no matter how much we might disagree with it, is essential in a peace process. 2) You can bow to the past but not be bound by it. This latter idea is essential when dealing with centuries of injustice and violence. The statement was actually made by Queen Elizabeth II when she visited Ireland during a reconciliation visit.
Sheridan is a man of deep faith. Love your neighbor as yourself is a teaching that is a core part of his leadership. He states that the majority of people are decent and essentially want the same things that he does. He bases his policies on getting to know each other’s families. Relationship building is essential in peace-building. He sees policing that way: improving people’s lives. There is no homogeneous viewpoint, Sheridan states.
Police Service of Northern Ireland – PSNI is an independent board that evaluates policing in NI. *This might help communities and the USA in general. However, Sheridan’s view is that “everyone is responsible for policing their neighborhood and community.”
Regarding attempts to make sure police are represented by commensurate percentages of gender identity and ethnicity he disagrees. “Selection should be based on skills and abilities.” He referred to the past attempts to artificially balance the force with percent representation. It did not result in peace. Note to the wise: this is based on his considerable experience. He began at age 16 as a junior volunteer in the police force, and rose in the ranks as an effective leader during the atrocities of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. When he could have been made the Chief of the police forces in Ireland he chose to accept leadership of Co-Operation Ireland – NI’s Peace and Reconciliation organization. A 36-year veteran in the police force and graduate of Cambridge, Peter’s voice is a powerful one for the USA police justice movement, Black Lives Matter.
As many black activists and leaders in Louisville and Minneapolis have recently called for, policing needs to be community-based and part of true relationship-building, not the violent policies that characterize American policing today. Listen to the interview with Peter Sheridan by Padriag O’Tuama on the Corrymella Podcast below.
Christine Bell, Professor of Constitutional Law at Edinburgh University, in a recent interview on the Corrymella Podcast, states these two questions as fundamental to achieving reconciliation and peace.
Another key statement Dr. Bell shares is that Peace and Reconciliation process is not about solving a problem, but rather, agreeing to disagree and working forward to find ways that move us closer to agreement. A key part of it is getting to know each other on a nonpolitical basis, finding ways to be in dialogue about common experiences.
At one point in this interview, Padriag O’Tuama, a theology leader in Ireland and founder of the Corrymella Community, mentions that Joe Biden is searching for a process like this to help heal the divided nation of the U.S.A.
What can Big Data Add to the Peace Process?
Bell is involved internationally with states and groups that are studying big data collected from 200 countries of the world community from 1990 forward. 170 peace agreements exist among them, and data shows that at least 39 subsequents agreements after the declaration of peace were required to actually achieve peace. But, people came together who disagreed. They agreed to disagree to enter into a peace process. Dr. Bell states that you begin with the two questions, 1) who do we want to be,, and 2) how do we become that?
How can this information help Americans achieve national unity?
Clearly things are changing in the U.S. and we are bitterly divided with each side of the political divide distrusting the other. Listen here and think about how you could start a process to come together using these two questions in your local community. Who do we want to be and how do we get there? Listen here.
I woke to a dense fog hovering over Dream Meadows Farm. Sun filtered through the mist. A little later when I stood on my porch breathing in the fresh cool air, I noticed how the lawns and the farmland had turned emerald. Distant dogwoods are in their glory. Redbuds in full flower. Skies blue.
Everyday is a wonder.
The world’s problems and threats are still there but viewed from my porch this morning each seems possible to overcome or at least, prepare to face. When I remember to just stand in my own feet and be right here, right now, the world opens up to everything I have always yearned for. Right here all the time.
Grateful for this moment, this day. Be well my friends!
Susan Feathers 