I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief. We humans have been given a privileged place in a world that is beautiful beyond description, and we are destroying it and destroying each other. I cope with that by building temporary psychological damns and dikes to hold back that grief. ... If I weren’t politically active, I would lose my mind.

One of the most successful performance artists of the 21st century has returned to the stage—and we’re not talking about Lady Gaga here.

fortunately I don’t actually have to choose between Hopkins and Greer. If I did have to, I would feel that much of what drew me to Transition had been lost to organizational identity and pride One is only forced to make such a choice when a set of ideas or principles gets mistaken for the foundation or orthodoxy of a Movement. Those of us in Transition should take this as a great warning.

Rob Hopkins' critique of the "Green Wizards" project explored in recent Archdruid Report posts raises challenging questions: some of them about the project in question, others about the relationship between differing efforts to respond to a challenging future. The Archdruid offers his take on both subjects.

Not long ago, most socialists had little to say about environmental issues, and the environmental movement was focused on individual (change your light bulbs) and capitalist (create a market for emissions) solutions to the ecological crisis.

read more

This essay [by the co-originator of the permaculture concept] provides a framework for understanding the ideological roots of the current global crisis that I believe is more useful than the now tired Left Right political spectrum. I use this framework to provide a commentary on current political machinations around Climate Change and Peak Oil.

-The Erosion of America's Middle Class
-Death by Growth: What the Climate-Bill Autopsies Missed
-The Federal Reserve Enters Decline

For Gulf residents, the BP oil spill has made the problem of unchecked corporate power painfully clear.

Dena Hoff talks about La Via Campesina’s vision of social change, and how the agricultural challenges faced around the world are not always so different from those faced in the U.S.

The leftist parties seek economic growth, arguing that only in this way will the standard of living of their citizens be enhanced and greater world equality achieved. The indigenista movements say their objective is not economic growth but coming to terms with PachaMama, or mother earth.

- Juliet Schor's new book "Plenitude"
- But will it make you happy?
- Ted Trainer's ‘Abandon affluence’ — 25 years on
- The self-storage self
- The solution to jobless growth

read more

In unemployed worker groups and common security clubs across the country, participants are facing two grim realities. The first is that jobs that vanished aren’t coming back.

While political forces have conspired to make the Zapatistas largely invisible both inside Mexico and internationally, their challenge has always been to propose a paradigm of development th

For many years, the lobbying fight for climate legislation on Capitol Hill has been led by a collection of the most corporate and moderate environmental groups, outfits like the Environment

Ample blame exists for the demise of climate legislation in the U.S. Senate, from President Obama’s lack of political courage, to the environmental community’s overly ambitious strategy, to Republican intransigence. A way forward exists, however, to build on the rubble of the Senate’s failure to cap carbon emissions.