How to Restore Our Relationship to Earth

According to the Ecological Footprint Network,
 humans currently consume at a rate 1.7 times
what Earth’s generative capacity can sustain—and
the gap is growing.

To have a viable human future on this overstressed planet, it is essential that we build a solidarity economy that seeks material sufficiency and spiritual abundance for all in balance with a living Earth. We must join in common cause to build local relationships of caring and equitable sharing across the lines of race, religion, and class. Strong and healthy local relationships, however, are only one element of the larger economic transformation required to rebalance our relationship to Earth and achieve a radical redistribution of access to and control of the essentials of living.

Read the Yes! Magazine story by David Korten - “How to Restore Our Relationship to Earth.”

G20 Summit: Climate Change Diplomacy in the Age of Trump Gets Complicated

Leaders of the world's largest economic powers will have a chance this weekend to show whether President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement strengthened their resolve to act on climate change—or whether it opened cracks in their solidarity.

If no separate climate action plan is approved by the
G20 members, that would be a statement that the U.S.
has shaken unity on global climate action

The G20 summit in Hamburg is the first top-level diplomatic gathering of all the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases since Trump's announcement, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the host, has pledged to put climate change high on the agenda.

"We cannot wait until every last person on Earth has been convinced of the scientific proof," Merkel said in a speech last week.

Even though a host of other contentious issues—trade, migration, North Korea's nuclear ambitions, and the fraught relationship between the U.S. and Russia—are likely to get more attention, Merkel has virtually guaranteed that the meeting will include a litmus test on climate fortitude. After she assumed her one-year presidency of the G20 in December, she set up a sustainability working group that has developed a detailed policy roadmap for the nations to slash carbon emissions. That G20 action plan will be before the group in Hamburg. Together, the G20 countries are responsible for 80 percent of the world's greenhouse gas pollution.

Read the Inside Climate News story - “G20 Summit: Climate Change Diplomacy in the Age of Trump Gets Complicated.”

'All Together Now '- George Monbiot

• Community will be that place from which humanity will be best placed to address and mount a defence against climate change. Here, George Monbiot discusses the value and importance of community.

  

  George Monbiot.

Without community, politics is dead. But communities have been scattered like dust in the wind. At work, at home, both practically and imaginatively, we are atomised.

Politics, as a result, is experienced by many people as an external force, dull and irrelevant at best, oppressive and frightening at worst. It is handed down from above rather than developed from below. 

There are exceptions – the Sanders and Corbyn campaigns for example – but even they seemed shallowly rooted by comparison to the deep foundations of solidarity that movements grew from in the past, and may disperse as quickly as they gather.

It is in the powder of shattered communities that anti-politics swirls, raising towering dust devils of demagoguery and extremism. These tornadoes threaten to tear down whatever social structures still stand.

Read this week’s article by Guardian columnist, George Monbiot - “All Together Now.”