Culture and Change

Explore our archive of articles on Culture and Change.

Reframing Global Citizenship

Journal Article

In the broadest terms, an ecological civilization encompasses themes of multiple groups from around the world. It incorporates Indigenous concepts...insights from ecological economics and commons theory, and principles from the permaculture, Transition Towns, degrowth, and agroecology movements. It reflects spiritual underpinnings of Deep Ecology, engaged Buddhism, and universalist Christian theology. It embraces ideas from the anti-globalization, eco-socialist, social justice, LGBTQ rights, and Rights of Nature movements, among others.

Building Unified Social Movements

Journal Article

How do we address the global imperative of building a strong and enduring global resistance against very powerful forces that are wrecking our lives and the planet and at the same time constituting another world if we are divided?

How Well Do ‘Elites’ Understand the Metacrisis?

Journal Article

I think the carbon pulse has skewed our biological template towards being individualistic and competitive and that is not our destiny or our genome. I think a lot of the people who are CEOs and national politicians do have a preponderance of narcissism...it's the way that our culture has trained our human behavior. I'm most interested in the levers and how we might be able to shift them or at least shift them in certain pockets around the world.

Openness and Strength

Journal Article

Welcome to the newest issue of Kosmos, 'Openness and Strength'. Click here for the full list of features and to read the Editorial: "Many are preparing for profound change. Yet, change is not dictated by outside forces alone, acting upon us. We too have the capacity to be agents of transformation. The Year of the Wood Dragon symbolizes this powerful potential energy, tempered by balance and inner growth."

Transcending Inherited Narratives

Journal Article

By transcending inherited social categories like religious/secular, right/left, East/West, North/South, capitalist/socialist, we see that a common goal of the consolidated regressive agenda is to restore authoritarian, top-down, punitive, in-group versus out-group systems in both the family and the state or tribe.

Left-Brain Bias is Harming Our Planet

Journal Article

The entire enterprise of reducing a rainforest or mangroves to so many tonnes of carbon is left brain bias par excellence. The complex web of symbiotic human and non-human life co-evolving from moment to moment in an unbroken chain which goes back hundreds of millions of years is reduced to a single metric - CO2. All so that companies can call themselves “carbon neutral” - another typically left-brain concept.

What if Women Designed the City?

Journal Article

"The case for cities adopting a beyond-sustainability regenerative approach is profoundly compelling. Pragmatic in their orientation, closely connected to the concerns of their residents, cities also contain the seeds of their own regeneration. However, historically cities have been planned, developed and built primarily through taking the male experience as the reference. As a result, cities tend to function better for men than they do for women."

Being Taught by Sacred Pain

Journal Article

"In an attempt to keep us feeling individualized and separate from the land-metabolism, modernity takes away our sense of the unquestionable value of life and instead creates a fundamental void that we associate with worthlessness. To feel a temporary sense of self-worth, we are made to produce stuff that modernity recognizes as valuable. To feel a sense of completion, we are made to accumulate stuff that we believe can fill the void.”

Do We Have Any Idea What Deprogramming Ourselves Looks Like?

Journal Article

This working list of invitations for “steps back” and “steps forward” was created to assist individuals and groups in the global north to address some of the contemporary challenges of bringing people together to respond to local and global challenges.

Impermanent and Eternal | Portraits of Tibet

Journal Article

It has been (and continues to be) a joy to be allowed to record the lives of these remarkable people – a kind of photo-driven love letter to what could be a dying way of life. The experience of hanging out with families in their black yak hair tents has been both down to earth and profound, awakening some ancient memory inside me.