A Copernican shift is underway in fields as diverse as agriculture, materials science, architecture, engineering, business, economics, urban planning, waste management, national security, and many others. In every case, it is driven by the need to discover patterns and larger systems essential to reaching higher levels of efficiency and lower environmental impacts—and by the requirements […]
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A Cure for Appalachia
A patient diagnosed with cancer must confront a long, difficult road to recovery. The same can be said for the hundreds of mountaintops in Appalachia that have been ravaged by strip mining. America’s addiction to cheap energy has spread disease amongst some of our most beautiful natural resources. From a fatalistic point of view, we […]
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Back to Our Roots
Last September I attended the Prairie Festival at The Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas. At the institute, Wes Jackson and his colleagues are undertaking one of the most important agricultural research projects in the world. They have gone back to first principles and are breeding new grain crops that are perennials rather than annuals. To […]
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How 350 Has Sparked Hope
In late 2008, James Hansen and nine colleagues published a paper designed to save the world. Years from now, when historians write the definitive history of the climate movement, they may well conclude that Hansen and his colleagues succeeded. For consider the remarkable impact to date of their paper, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity […]
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Beyond the Obituaries
We met in 1974 on the north coast of Jamaica, in Discovery Bay, then one of the great pioneer centers of coral reef science. At the time, many of us blithely took the reefs for granted. They were already largely fishless, which we noted, but luxuriant living corals carpeted the reefs built up by their […]
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Believing Is Seeing
Could the old adage “Seeing is believing” have it backwards? Increasingly, we’re learning that we humans see our world through a paradigm, as Donella Meadows reminded us in her seminal article, republished in the first issue of Solutions. A paradigm boils down to our “great big unstated assumptions,” she wrote, “or deepest set of beliefs […]
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Women in the World
In 2010, the world’s women face daunting challenges, yet they are also the most promising and untapped agents of change. Who can forget the ink-stained fingers of the 2,000 Iraqi women who ran for parliament in that war-torn country’s 2010 elections; or the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina fighting for justice and […]
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American Prospect: Decline and Rebirth
Most of us who care deeply about the conditions of the United States and its public policy are sustained and carried forward by the expectation that serious progress in the directions we favor is coming, sooner or later, and that things will get better. And the harder we work for the change, the better it […]
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Missolutions, Dyssolutions, and Malsolutions
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” —H.L. Menken Everyone, it seems, has a solution for the energy and environmental problems our global civilization must confront in the next two decades. Build more windmills. Grow corn to produce ethanol. Construct more nuclear plants. Clean up coal. Drill baby […]
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End Tax Cuts for the Wealthy; Invest in Infrastructure
Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from a speech Senator Sanders (I-VT) gave in December 2010 on the senate floor to protest President Obama’s proposed tax cut compromise. As everybody knows, the United States has a record-breaking national debt exceeding $14 trillion at the same time as the middle class is collapsing and poverty is […]