Category: Commentary
Posts discussing social and political issues of interest
EXPLORING CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH FICTION
LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE Christopher Walker has developed a course in climate fiction at Colby College, a private liberal arts college founded in 1831. Colby is part of the US tradition of liberal arts education that has survived the trend for institutions of higher education to be driven by economic imperatives towards more [...]
Jem Bendell Interviews Dr Wolfgang Knorr
This blog post is reproduced from the Deep Adaptation newsletter Preamble: In June 2019 I met with Dr Wolfgang Knorr, a climate scientist with Lund University. With his dozens of peer reviewed climate papers generating thousands of citations, it is clear he has spent decades at the heart of the climate science profession. He wanted [...]
Entropia
Samuel Alexander, Entropia, 2019 When industrial civilisation collapsed in the third decade of the 21st century, a community living on a small island in the South Pacific Ocean found itself permanently isolated from the rest of the world. With no option but to build a self-sufficient economy with very limited energy supplies, this community set [...]
Mindscaping Tibet—Dan Smyer Yü
Dan Smyer Yü (2015) Mindscaping the Landscape of Tibet: Place, Memorability, Ecoaesthetics Religion and Society, Vol.60, Walter de Gruyer, Berlin Dan Smyer Yü is a Professor and Founding Director at the Centre for Trans-Himalayan Studies, Yunnan Minzu University, a core member of the Transregional Research Network at the University of Göttingen and a Research Group [...]The Serpent Gurrangatch and the Hunter Mirragan
Bhante Sujato This essay was presented by Bhante Sujato at a plenary session of the Sakyadhita 2019 conference in Leura, NSW. Global warming is an unprecedented threat to the survival of our civilization and culture, indeed our very lives. The aboriginal myth of Gurrangatch and Mirragan tells of a time when the land of the […]
Three Options at the End of Civilisation as We Know It
Samuel Alexander: Any of these three options outlined in this book will involve a transformation of such extreme magnitude that what emerges will no longer in any meaningful sense be this civilisation: the change will be the kind of extreme conceptual and existential magnitude that Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of ‘paradigm-shifts’, calls ‘revolutionary’. Thus, one [...]
Faith, Ceremony and Fearlessness
Today I attended my monthly gathering of dharma friends for a Riwo Sangchö practice. This is a smoke offering ceremony that acts as a physical metaphor for transforming all the negativities in the world, freeing them into the indivisible unity of space and wisdom. I am a Western woman, brought up culturally as an Anglican [...]
Beyond the Zero Sum Game
TRAFFIC JAM ON EVEREST This photo is likely to become one of the most famous images of 2019. It perfectly encapsulates the zero-sum game of modern society. Known to the Tibetan People as Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the Universe, one of the Mountain Gods of ancient Tibet, for the modern cashed-up consumer it has become [...]