By Birju Pandya The recent group discussion around the ‘Underestimating the Challenges of a Ghastly Future’ (UCGF) paper felt quite lively and meaningful to me, grateful for the opportunity to attend! As I took in the discussion, I had a few reflections come up, which I offer below in the spirit of furthering the dialogue. […]
The COVID-19 pandemic is widely seen as a potential turning point after which almost everything could be different. Margaret MacMillan, the eminent historian, has compared this crisis to the French and Russian revolutions – points at which the river of history changed course. And it’s almost certain that as a result of this crisis there […]
I was born at the end of the eighties, this side of Hansen’s testimony to the US Congress and before the first Scientists’ Warning and Earth Summit in 1992. Much of the subsequent mainstream narrative on the environmental crisis seems to have been akin to warning fellow crewmates on a ship of a far-off storm. A small deviation in course would avoid disaster in the future. It is of course challenging to learn that, in the intervening thirty-odd years, the bearing was not changed, and the ship accelerated, as so many warned throughout. We are now well into the storm and heading deeper, as this paper so thoroughly reminds us. This next stage materially changes our strategies for shared survival. What to do?
Summertime in Winter with Akwasi Aidoo, poet, human rights and peace advocate.
Raj Patel is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and academic with voluminous experience and expertise in understanding and seeking change in food systems.
By Mark Valentine and Katherine Fulton May 2020 This essay was completed on April 20, 2020, to coincide with the first meeting of the advisory board of Omega: The Resilience Funders Network. While Omega’s efforts had been underway for some time, the context had now radically shifted, and this essay is an attempt to look […]