Reader’s Essay | Aligning the Personal, Political, and Planetary to Create a Transformative Future
For several years I worked on a memoir in which I tried to make sense of my privileged childhood, and how my personal experience was shaped by the politics of my era, as well as by the experiences of my parents and earlier generations. Then in 2011 I suddenly woke up to the destruction of the environment and the reality of climate change. I started a blog, Transition Times, as a way to process my…
Letter from Ban Ki-Moon | Lima to Paris and What’s At Stake
The goal of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is “the stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
The Convention, and the agreement that will be reached in Paris at COP21, are agreements between countries. But it will require all of society, including local…
Bringing Awareness into Action
Dear Readers,
Most of us have the basic facts at this point. We can see how disregard for people and planet is at the root of many problems: the refugee crisis, terrorism, climate change, extreme disparity and injustice. We are aware of the situation, and our heart tells us something must be done, yet these global concerns often seem personally overwhelming.
In Engaged Ecology: Seven…
Igniting Civic Engagement | Call for Participants in a Kosmos Pilot Study
Kosmos is launching a research initiative to test a new model for building civic engagement.
In 2014, Kosmos commissioned a communication research study to better understand an emerging global transformation movement and how groups within the movement could connect more effectively.
Five key themes emerged from the Study:
The Global Transformation Movement is self-organizing
It is a…
The Rise of Community Energy
Via Transition Network.org
21 Stories of Transition is the Transition movement’s contribution to COP21 (the 21st ‘Conference of the Parties’), the United Nations’ climate change negotiations in Paris, happening now.
We invited Transition groups to send us the stories they’d like us to share. From those, we selected the stories that make up this book. They represent the experiences of people…
The Biology of Wonder | Finding the Human in Nature
Of course, the animals need humans. They need us like old parents, against whom we have revolted for a while and who one day, weakened, deprived of their former power, request to be protected by us.
~ Brigitte Kronauer1
Subjective Feeling as the Moving Force in All Life
For 150 years, biology, the ‘science of life,’ made no great effort to answer the question of what life really is. Biologists…
Telling it Slant
By Jay Griffiths
Image by Drriss and Marrionn via Flickr
"Tell the truth but tell it slant" - Emily Dickinson.
The slanted mind. The enigmatic phrase. The allusive, elusive subject. Literature lives in these worlds, it flourishes in metaphoric thinking, in shaded meanings.
And yet, and yet, and yet... many writers also feel a sense of profound responsibility to write directly about…
Indigenous Stories: Enduring Memories of Ancient Sea Rise
By John Upton via Climate Central
To most of us, the rush of the oceans that followed the last ice age seems like a prehistoric epoch. But the historic occasion was dutifully recorded — coast to coast — by the original inhabitants of the land Down Under.
Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations…
The Case for Restorative Narratives
At Images & Voices of Hope (ivoh), a media-related nonprofit, we’ve been developing a genre called Restorative Narrative—stories that show how people and communities are making meaningful progression from despair to resilience. Restorative Narratives explore despair and address difficult truths, but they also move the storyline forward by showing how the affected people and communities are…
Re-Storying Our Future
Dear Readers,
Like many, we are heartbroken by the recent acts of extreme hatred unleashed on innocent people and communities around the world. Yet, we resist the narrow, mainstream narratives that generate fear and vengeance.
Our stories — they bind us in ways which can help us or harm us. So many of the conflicts in this world are about the stories we tell ourselves and one another. We…