Must Collapse Be Inevitable? Imagining A “Half-Earth” Sustainable Economy, by Pete Dolack

Image by Sam Saunders via Flickr

by Pete Dolack
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Systemic Disorder, July 6, 2022
July 9, 2022

It seems vastly easier to imagine the future as a dystopian nightmare than as a time when today’s problems are mostly behind humanity. For every work of optimism, such as Star Trek, there are dozens of works imagining a nightmare world of deprivation, environmental destruction and severe repression amidst a world of people scrambling to survive anyway they can in a war of all against all.

Maine Farm Girl and Kansas Grain Farmer Talk Climate on The Train, by Rivera Sun

Image by Carl Wycoff via Flickr

by Rivera Sun
Writer, Dandelion Salad
March 12, 2021

A young Kansas grain farmer and I were riding on a train through Iowa when the subject of the climate crisis came up. He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed son of a multigenerational Midwest farming family. I’d grown up on a potato farm in Northern Maine. Both of us spent our teenage years in overalls. We compared tractor models (him, John Deere; me, 1960s FarmAll).

What Price a Livable Planet? by Paul Street

Image by Julia Hawkins via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
April 23, 2019

I suppose we all owe UCLA economist and Hoover Institution senior fellow Lee Ohanian a debt of gratitude for telling us how it is. The “free market” propagandist recently took to the pages of The Hill, a Washington, D.C., journal for political insiders, to explain that the holy laws of economics dictate that humanity must consent to its own extermination. In a piece titled “The Green New Deal is a Pipe Dream,” Ohanian drowned climate activists’ overheated dreams of ecological salvation in the icy waters of bourgeois reality, arguing that the proposed legislation’s advocates are, in fact, nefarious, big-government “command-and-control” zealots—eco-Stalinists—who want “to impose their social and economic preferences on others at an extravagantly high economic cost.”

I don’t like the phrase “Climate Change.” It’s too mild. Try Climate Catastrophe. by Paul Street

Image by Takver via Flickr

by Paul Street
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Official Website of Paul Street
April 10, 2019

In the last years of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke against what he called “the triple evils that are interrelated” – economic inequality, racism, and militarism. If King were alive today, he’d be talking about the five evils that are interrelated, adding patriarchy and Ecocide, the destruction of livable ecology. He’d also be noting the dangerous rise of a new national and global fascism linked to the presidency of a malignant racist who glories in accelerating humanity’s environmental self-destruction while the media obsesses over matters of far slighter relevance.

Why Germany Leads in Renewables: It Has Its Own Green Bank by Ellen Brown

Image by I saw_that via Flickr

Updated: Feb. 10, 2019 and Feb. 12, 2019

by Ellen Brown
Writer, Dandelion Salad
The Web of Debt Blog
January 27, 2019

The Green New Deal endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and more than 40 other US Representatives has been criticized as imposing a too-heavy burden on the rich and upper-middle-class taxpayers who will have to pay for it, but taxing the rich is not what the Green New Deal resolution proposes. It says funding will come primarily from certain public agencies, including the Federal Reserve and “a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks.”