What If Preventing Collapse Isn’t Profitable?
The notion that modern industrial civilization is fundamentally unsustainable and is therefore likely to collapse at some point is not a new one. Even before the Limits to Growth report of 1972, many ecologists were concerned that our continual expansion of...
Gritty Hope: now what could possibly go right?
“If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that...
Why the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill could lead to a revolution of the imagination
One of the few rays of hopeful sunshine in the UK’s currently bleak political landscape is the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. In fact, I feel like it is such a vitally important development that I want to use this...
Nature Is Intentionally Beautiful
In his essay “Darwin’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful: What’s Musical About Biology and Why Does That Matter?”, Bob Labaree posed four questions about music and nature, which I could summarize as: Are the virtuosic inventions of a virus on...
Vicki’s Answers: What Could Possibly Go Right?
Is it too weird to say that, as bad as the first half of 2020 has been, it’s been a relief? A tiny virus has achieved what decades of activism could not: stop us in our self-destructive tracks. She...
Doom or denial: Is there another path?
I was recently asked to comment on a dustup between some members of Extinction Rebellion (see Thomas Nicholas, Galen Hall, and Colleen Schmidt, “The Faulty Science, Doomism, and Flawed Conclusions of Deep Adaptation”) and Jem Bendell, founder of Deep...
Sherri Mitchell on decolonizing the mind
The recent surge in Black Lives Matter protests following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, along with growing evidence that COVID-19 is disproportionately hitting communities of color, have raised urgent questions about structural racism and...
Avalanche
How bad could it get? For the United States, it seems there is no bottom. Back in March, I wrote that the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic would likely shape its economic, political, and geopolitical fortunes for years or decades...
Pandemic, Protest, and Profit
So, here we are, at it again. For me the chaotic progression of these last months is a reminder of my introduction to America, fifty years ago, as a graduate student in North Carolina: National Guard troops, riot gear,...
What Could Possibly Go Right?
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we...