On the delusions of American exceptionalism.

While a lot of people listening to Michael might get stuck on the "It's too late to save the world." part of his message, that was really the just preface to his core message, which was "It's not too late to love the world."

The city's microclimates alienate animals and plants. But with a reconfiguration of belief systems about what city life can or should be, creating urban microclimates that invite animals and plants to thrive is feasible.

We were born here and we are meant to die here. That is our destiny. It always was. We can either embrace it, or we can continue to deny it, to tell ourselves wishful stories about interstellar travel and making a home for humans on other planets, and thereby hasten our extinction.

Few behavior changes necessary for handling climate change overlap the issue of poverty and carbon footprint so blatantly.

People are able to organize very complex distribution and exchange mechanisms in a very short time without the intervention of state institutions. […] People did not engage in a general war for survival, but gathered in smaller groups around small 'pools' of remaining resources.

What I am advocating is a radical reappraisal of how we relate to our food, whether animal, vegetable, or both.

Every day, it seemed, I had to watch the people around me destroy plants and animals with a determination I seldom see humans apply to anything else.

“The film is asking us to come to terms with some difficult realities which we have yet to face: namely, that sustaining our infinite growth, industrial civilization on renewables is neither desirable nor possible, yet that is exactly what green capitalists are intent on pursuing.”

Our land is dying; our neighbors are dying; everything sacred is being hunted down and destroyed. But tonight, at this moment, all I can do is pause to feel gratitude for the rain.

Certain gardens are not retreats, but attacks—attacks on the kind of world that says it is meaningless to do something so small, so local, so specific.

Humanitarian crises will weaken borders between “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations, and guaranteeing these borders will continue to weigh on the US Military. How can we better prepare for this impending fate?

Human civilization is a fire. It’s been burning since we’ve been human. And the human story is not a straight line, but a circle, a great ring of fire.

“the war on invasive species is a distraction from genuine ecological change, through spending our time and money on ‘carrying on like before’ whilst shooting the messengers of change; invasive species.”

You will not see me slipping through the door
on the day the freezers break but you might see my face
on the otherside looking at you from another place

As the pressure builds, we know we cannot carry on as we have been doing. We, as a species, will reap what we have sown, in one way or another, for I feel we are too far gone for anything else.

Unlike Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man, we are not gods or supermen or cyborgs. We are human beings. And to be human to be limited. Ironically, it is in our capacity to embrace our finitude, to love it even, that our salvation lies.

Norman Borlaug and William Vogt are, respectively, the Wizard and the Prophet in the title of Charles Mann’s 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World. Mann presents Borlaug and Vogt as archetypes, representatives of two different visions of humankind’s relationship with the natural world: the one viewing nature as a something to be bent to the will of humankind, the other viewing nature as something to which humankind must bend.

As global warming produces conditions favourable for the breeding of mosquitoes and the spread of malaria (or ague as it was once known), this essay looks at the lore associating it with hags and witches, who paradoxically were believed to cause and cure it.

Current Big Green proposals for a Green New Deal are coalescing around inadequate targets.