I might be wrong about this, but it seems that over the last couple of years more and more people have been working their way to the conclusion that modern society is fundamentally broken — not just broken in a way that can be fixed with a little tinkering here…

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of spending a couple of days with an Indigenous hillside tribe here in Thailand called Hin Lad Nai, and I wanted to share some of that story with you today. It’s the story of a small community who, when faced with a…

Herman Daly, who died in October of this year, was for 60 years a powerful and articulate critic of mainstream economic thinking. Along with an early stint working at the World Bank, Daly had a distinguished career in academia, authored numerous books, and was the 1996 recipient of the Right…

Transnational corporations have been spectacularly successful in their profit-driven quest to hook the world on junk food. The global sale of packaged foods swelled to US$2.8 trillion by 2020, and is estimated to balloon to $3.4 trillion by 2027. Soda (soft drink) sales have exploded globally, reaching $995 billion by…

Most mainstream responses to climate chaos today rely heavily on high technology and big business. We rarely hear about solutions — often rooted in the past — that are localized, low-tech, and don’t advance the interests of large corporations. These are precisely the kind of technologies explored in depth on…

On 11 October 2022, the International Monetary Fund’s head of research, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, warned that today’s high energy prices were not going away any time soon. The “energy crisis”, he cautioned, “is not a transitory shock”. The same could be said for what he called the “food crisis”. As Gourinchas…

The health complaints started rolling in within weeks of the activation of a new cellphone tower in August 2020 in Pittsfield, an old factory town in Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains. Seventeen residents reported headaches, dizziness, insomnia or confusion. A few children had to sleep with “vomit buckets” by their beds. Like…

A collective of urban families in the Jordanian capital, Amman, are reclaiming their food sovereignty by cultivating native wheat varieties in empty urban plots. At a time when the world is suffering from a food crisis caused by climate change and exacerbated by the Russian-Ukrainian war, this initiative aims to…

Labor unions and social movements in Brazil have been fighting a pitched battle to stop their far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, from pursuing his drive to privatize many of the country’s most important public assets. …