Two Realities
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. –Robert Frost Our contemporary world is host to two coexisting but fundamentally different—and, in at least...
Sustainability vs. Resilience
This is a response to the article The End of Sustainability. William E. Rees is the co-creator of the Eco-Footprint concept and a Post Carbon Fellow. He authored the The Human Nature of Unsustainability, and Thinking Resilience chapters of...
West-Slope Colorado Towns Restore Local Flows, Even as Thirsty Front-Range Lawns Drink From their Rivers
The Roaring Fork River, a headwater tributary in the Colorado Basin, adds to the beauty and economic vitality of Aspen, Colorado. Photo credit: Grand River Consulting for the Colorado Water Trust. When residents in Denver, Colorado Springs and other...
Changing People’s Minds about Fossil Fuels
Word came recently that both the Philadelphia Quakers and the Unitarian General Assembly have decided to divest from fossil fuels. It followed by few weeks the news that the Roman Catholic University of Dayton and Union Theological Seminary, the...
Along the Rio Grande, An Innovative Water Market Restores Riverside Habitat
With rivers in the American Southwest dammed, diverted, drought-stricken and running dry, their fate is increasingly in human hands. Now, in the southern portion of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, a unique partnership of irrigators, government agencies and...
The Peak Oil Crisis: Iraq on the Precipice
The daily newspapers are now full of stories predicting that Iraq, as we know it, will soon disintegrate into three or more warring states. In the last two weeks Sunni insurgents led by the extremist ISIS have routed a...
Recent Loss of Freshwater Wetlands Worldwide Valued at $2.7 Trillion per Year
The question of whether to drain a wetland to make way for a shopping mall or a cornfield, or to instead leave the wetland intact, often seems like a no-brainer: the “development” options have a clear dollar value, but...
Bottom Up, Top Down
Those of us who have some grasp of the urgent dilemmas posed by climate change and peak oil face a terrible conundrum. The whole system of industrial civilization is moving toward collapse. How can we reverse course to avert...
Meet Ashoka Fellow Janelle Orsi
Meet new Ashoka Fellow Janelle Orsi. Janelle is Executive Director of Sustainable Economies Law Center, and a Fellow of Post Carbon Institute.
Want to Change the World? Read This First
History is often made by strong personalities wielding bold new political, economic, or religious doctrines. Yet any serious effort to understand how and why societies change requires examination not just of leaders and ideas, but also of environmental circumstances....