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Author Spotlight
David Blanton is a writer, photographer, conservationist, and environmental activist. He is the founder of Friends of Serengeti.
Jodie Evans is the co-founder of CODEPINK and has been a peace, environmental, women’s rights, and social justice activist for over 50 years.
Reynard Loki is a co-founder of the Observatory, where he is the environment and animal rights editor.
Alexander Zaitchik is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and a freelance journalist based in New Orleans. He is the author of several books, including Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19.
Tina Casey has been writing about sustainability, the global energy transition, and related matters since 2009. She is a regular contributor to CleanTechnica and TriplePundit, where she also focuses on corporate social responsibility and social issues.
Guides
This guide will take you through examples of the regenerative, moneyless economy that is sometimes called “collaborative consumption.” The moneyless, sharing-based economy creates the opportunity to opt out of the mentality of disposability and the idea that “more is better,” both of which many of us are bombarded with from birth. The regenerative, moneyless economy provides an avenue for anyone to move away from the hoarding nightmare that has led to over-full garages and seldom-visited storage sheds, continent-sized trash islands, and enormous heaps of human waste. It does this by way of peer-to-peer systems set up for people to rent or borrow goods rather than buy and own them individually. It involves collaborative systems that supply people with the things they need, when they need them.
Industrial agriculture, with its heavy reliance on chemical inputs, monoculture cropping, and intensive farming practices, poses a significant threat to the environment and wildlife. The negative impacts of industrial agriculture include wildlife habitat destruction and biodiversity loss, soil degradation, water pollution, antibiotic resistance, major greenhouse gas emissions, and animal cruelty on a massive scale. Sustainable alternatives to industrial agriculture, such as organic farming, small-scale farming, regenerative farming, and veganic farming—offer a better way forward. These sustainable farming practices not only offer a way to produce food while minimizing harm, ensuring a more resilient and sustainable food system for future generations, but can also solve existential problems like climate change.
This guide explores the concept, models, and examples of the peace economy: the giving, sharing, thriving, caring economy without which none of us would be alive. A peace economy is the sharing of resources, a culture of care, and the remembrance that there is enough abundance for all of us on this planet. It is the return to a culture that understands true value and wealth come from nurturing life, love, and joy. We call it a "local" peace economy because it operates at the local level, beginning in the commons. This guide also offers ways to divest from the war economy that is destroying life and well-being on this planet.
This guide explores the evolutionary origins of aesthetics in humans, otherwise known as bioaesthetics. Bioaesthetics is an interdisciplinary field that bridges biology, psychology, philosophy, and art to investigate aesthetic perception and how we perceive certain forms. Emerging research underlines the fact that our sense of beauty isn't purely cultural and has biological underpinnings.
Environmental health is crucial for public well-being as it directly impacts human health. Pollution, climate change, and habitat destruction can lead to respiratory diseases, waterborne illnesses, and other health issues. Maintaining clean air, water, and land reduces the risk of disease transmission and promotes overall health. Additionally, preserving ecosystems supports biodiversity, which contributes to food security and medicine discovery. Sustainable practices safeguard public health for current and future generations, emphasizing the vital connection between environmental and public health.
New Additions
Reducing global inequality and saving the planet from climate catastrophe are intertwined. Let’s address both at once.
By John Feffer
The attraction to luster is rooted in our evolutionary history and has persisted among prehistoric artifacts, ancient civilizations, and consumer culture.
Political partisanship is predicted by the way our brains process basic political words or concepts.
By Eric Laursen
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Peter Coyote invites you to look at the media, research, and education initiatives related to the Human Bridges Project.
By Peter Coyote
Classics
From Wikipedia:
- “Woman in the Nineteenth Century is a book by American journalist, editor, and women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller. Originally published in July 1843 in The Dial magazine as ‘The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,’ it was later expanded and republished in book form in 1845.”
- “The basis for Fuller’s essay is the idea that man will rightfully inherit the earth when he becomes an elevated being, understanding of divine love. There have been periods in time when the world was more awake to this love, but people are sleeping now; however, everyone has the power to become enlightened. Man cannot now find perfection because he is still burdened with selfish desires, but Fuller is optimistic and says that we are on the verge of a new awakening. She claims that in the past man, like Orpheus for Eurydice, has always called out for woman, but soon will come the time when women will call for men, when they will be equals and share divine love.”
Little is known about American cookbook author Susanna Shanklin Browne, but her motives for writing The Plain Sailing Cook Book are clearly stated in the preface; her inspiration was to write what she believed in 1922 was the first cookbook “successfully adapted to the needs of the person who has never before attempted to cook.” The contents include “the simpler every-day dishes that make up the staple menu of the average American family.” The book’s stated “aim is to provide ‘plain sailing’ for the wholly inexperienced mariner in culinary waters.”
The author expresses empathy for beginner cooks and explains recipes “in such a way as to leave no possible room for doubt or misunderstanding on any point.” “In preparing and arranging each recipe,” she continues, “I have tried to keep continually in mind the person who has never before cooked anything.”
“I have tried to leave nothing to the imagination, nothing to be guessed at, nothing to be decided from previous experience. In a word, I have tried to do as I would be done by, if I were the user of the book instead of the author,” she concludes.
Note: A product of its time, The Plain Sailing Cook Book assumes the reader is “the average housewife” cooking for two. But recipes may be multiplied for larger families, and beginner cooks of all genders and marital statuses will benefit from these basic lessons in cooking.
A survivor’s perspective on what it was like to be on the Titanic as it sank, with detailed accountings of his and other passengers’ accounts.
In this memoir, Frederick Douglass chronicles life as an enslaved boy in the American South, his eventual escape, and his new beginnings as a free man and abolitionist.
Note: This historical memoir may include outdated and offensive language.
This article on the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (associated with the movement of German idealism) appeared in the Philosophical Review, Volume 16, pp. 488-505, in 1907.
Ellen Bliss Talbot was a professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College from 1898 to 1932. From Wikisource:
“According to Dorothy Rogers and Therese B. Dykeman… ‘[Talbot] had a successful academic career, chairing Mount Holyoke’s philosophy department for thirty-two years and teaching part-time for several years after retirement. She published just three books, all on Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1898, 1899, 1906), in addition to her considerable number of articles in the Philosophical Review, Mind, and the American Journal of Psychology. Her commitment to women’s education at Mount Holyoke was unwavering, helping to ensure that the philosophy curriculum met the expectations of her fellow academicians as philosophy established itself as a profession.’ From ‘Introduction: Women in the American Philosophical Tradition 1800–1930,’ in Hypatia 19:2 (Spring 2004): viii-xxxiv.”
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