By James Trimarco — 2010
Researcher Paul Stamets says mushrooms can eat oil spills and rid the world of toxics–and he’s got proof.
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CLEAR ALL
A group of the world’s top ecologists have issued a stark warning about the snowballing crisis caused by climate change, population growth, and unchecked development. Their assessment is grim, but big-picture societal changes on a global scale can still avert a disastrous future.
Thinking more explicitly about cultural catalysis can help to accomplish in years what otherwise would require decades or not take place at all. As we experiment with cultural catalysis, we need to make it fast and benign rather than fast and pathological for the common good.
From the standpoint of almost every other living thing, humans, with a strategy of economic growth at all costs, have become a kind of hybrid deadly fungus, predatory lender and concentration camp management agency.
The long-term needs of ecosystems should come before our knee-jerk expectations about infrastructure.
The campaign to preserve half the Earth’s surface is being criticized for failing to take account of global inequality and human needs. But such protection is essential not just for nature, but also for creating a world that can improve the lives of the poor and disadvantaged.
Sustainability is often discussed in a high-level, conceptual way as the connection between people, planet, and profit. But in practice, it can be deeply intimate—a relationship to what nourishes us and enables us to thrive.
Knowing how environmental issues affect different groups of marginalized people in unique and often overlapping ways can help us build a more sustainable and equitable world.
From songs referencing grandma’s backyard garden to lyrics ripping government for destroying the water supply, many hip hop artists seamlessly weave climate justice into their sounds. After all, being sustainably savvy is how their grandparents and great-grandparents survived.
We need to think about the values we treasure, the world we create and the tablets we are writing. The Torah must be both adopted and adapted in this new world. We stand again at Sinai, and the revelation, dark or bright, is in our hands.
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In this interview, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a university professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, talks with the Bulletin’s Elisabeth Eaves about Islam and the environment.