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TUESDAYS — YOUR INBOX — ASSUREDLY
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CURATED ECOLOGICAL NEWS
Local food systems for sufficiency rather than for profit
“When people hear the word degrowth, they often imagine a future that still needs to be invented. But in many places, parts of that future already exist. In Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, a wide range of grassroots food networks have emerged: cooperative grocery stores, cooperative food processing sector or the food services industry, markets without middlemen, solidarity kitchens, urban gardening projects, and seed banks.
“These initiatives have been shaped by the Greek debt crisis and the related austerity, unemployment, social crisis and distrust in dominant institutions. But they also offer something more than emergency responses. They show what food systems can look like when organized around care, democracy and sufficiency.
“Across Europe, especially during the last years, food has become more expensive, more unequal and more dependent on fragile global supply chains. At the same time, industrial agriculture drives biodiversity loss, soil degradation, high energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.
“Degrowth asks a simple but radical question: what if food systems were designed not to maximize sales and accumulation, but to meet needs fairly within ecological limits?” [click the link for the full article]
Farm clubs that share equally labor and produce
“I’d like to catalyze a movement in this country that rebuilds a nation of farmers. Not another generation of John Deere-driving commodity growers, but millions of Earth-caring, soil-is-my-life, stewards-of-place, neoagrarians who’d make Wendell Berry swoon.
“The sad truth is that small farms can rarely compete financially. Often, they survive by having other income streams, part-time gigs off the farm, agritourism, or education. The farming club offers another means to make it by providing an experience and education while creating a community that can share the work, reduce costs.
“In the farming club model, a plot of land is farmed together, and the harvest is divided among members. This distinguishes it from gardening clubs or community gardens, where people tend to have individual plots. Some key advantages are: it enables more labor-efficient equipment, spreads the cost of shared infrastructure, gracefully accommodates sickness or travel needs, and enrolls novices into a group alongside more experienced farmers-in-training.
“We are in the third year of this farming club experiment. It still seems pretty new, but so much has already been learned that sharing my experience so far might help others. It became clear that something more organized was needed. So, together with Craig Litwin, I’ve launched the Farming Club Coalition.” [click the links for the full articles]
Smartphones and fertility decline — correlation, but causality?
“It was about two years ago when the global downturn in fertility came onto my radar. Year after embarrassing year, UN projections kept failing to anticipate tanking fertility around the globe.
“The trend really is astounding. Over two-thirds of humans on the planet live in countries whose fertility has fallen below replacement levels, and generally still heading downward. Population decline is arriving soon at an affluent country near you. Indeed, it’s already started declining in dozens of countries like Japan, China, Italy, etc.
“Those who worship economic growth are sounding the alarm (e.g., Vance, Musk), justifiable in their panic insofar as money is what matters most. But to the extent that economies wreck ecologies, I’m rooting for the other team — and population decline sounds perfectly peachy, even if the adjustment will be rough.
“I was intrigued by the 12-minute video titled ‘Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once’ by the Financial Times. That checks my boxes: a reputable outlet seeking to understand what’s behind the phenomenon.
This one contains lots of graphic data. It was the graphic at around 7:43 that made me sit up straight — ‘Percent change in total fertility rate relative to pre-smartphone trend, by years before/since smartphones’.
“While caution is warranted, links between the two phenomena are not particularly difficult to spot. Anyway, the net effect (3:50 in video) is a decline in the fraction of people finding partners. Fantasize all you want about connective efficacy, but that’s what’s actually happening the world-over.” [click the link for the full article]
Kansas infighting about data centers
“Hyperscale data centers have been popping up across the United States lately, including in Kansas. Last year, the Kansas Legislature passed a bill (SB 98) allowing for a 20-year state and local tax exemption for certain data center projects.
“Public opposition has been growing against data centers, with several advocate groups popping up on social media, including NO Data Centers in Kansas. Local officials have been enacting moratoriums on proposed data centers.
“The Director of No Data Centers in Kansas, Mike Engeman, said, ‘Our big concern is Kansas Senate Bill 98 that deals huge incentives for these companies to come. Moratoriums give a false sense of security to the public [because] cities and counties can remove the moratorium and approve a data center’.
“Rep. Brooklynne Mosley, a Lawrence Democrat, and Rep. Alexis Simmons, a Topeka Democrat, talked about why they embrace the grassroots uprising against data centers — and the political consequences for doing so. ‘Basically the people are self-mobilizing’, Mosley said. ‘They’re pushing back on this. So I’m seeing one of the biggest grassroots movements that I’ve seen in a long time’.
“A year ago, Mosley supported legislation that exempts construction materials used to build data centers from the state sales tax. Mosley and Simmons now support temporary moratoriums that would allow the Legislature to consider policies that range from improving government transparency to ensuring the companies that operate data centers pay for their environmental costs.
“Local government officials, developers and unions in Kansas have defended data center deals — typically negotiated in secret — by promising economic development. Traditional union concerns have taken a back seat as union leaders fixate on data centers, even though there is no guarantee they will be built with union labor.
“The Kansas AFL-CIO refused to endorse Mosley and Simmons this year, even though they have perfect ratings on the Kansas AFL-CIO report card. ‘I’ll be honest. I didn’t see that one coming’, Simmons said.” [click the links for the full articles]
Ending roadless rule would fragment habitat, pollute streams
“More than 400 endangered animal and plant species could face accelerated extinction after the Donald Trump administration’s decision to rescind a rule that has protected old-growth forests for more than two decades. Scrapping the Roadless Rule would put 7.4 million acres of designated endangered species critical habitat and nearly 1,800 miles of protected rivers and streams at risk.
“Said Randi Spivak, at the Center for Biological Diversity, ‘Our national forests are home to some of America’s most iconic animals, from grizzlies to hellbenders. These forests provide clean drinking water to countless communities. Bulldozing more roads through them will mean dirtier water, fragmented wildlife habitat and greater wildfire risk’.
“Critical habitat is land and water that federal scientists have determined is essential to the long-term survival of animals and plants protected under the Endangered Species Act. From the old-growth rainforests of Alaska’s Tongass to the sky island ranges of the Southwest and the headwaters of the Appalachians, the most imperiled wildlife in America’s national forests all need large, connected landscapes where nature’s systems remain intact.” [click the link for the full article]
Farm plastics pollution undermines its benefits
“Farmers have relied on plastic since the 1960s. Plastic mulch quickly became a cornerstone of crop production, helping farmers boost yields by stabilizing soil temperature and controlling diseases and weeds with fewer pesticides. Now scientists and policymakers are struggling to preserve the benefits of ‘plasticulture’ while mitigating a growing litany of environmental costs.
“Plastic production has skyrocketed, from about 2 million tons in 1950 to 460 million tons in 2019, and is expected to triple by 2060. Extracting and refining fossil fuels to make plastic polymers releases climate-warming pollutants and perpetuates the demand for oil and gas.
“Agricultural plastics — irrigation drip tape, fertilizer sacks, greenhouses and tunnels, shade nets, pesticide containers, and mulching films, to name a few — fragment into ‘microplastics’ that accumulate in soils, contaminate waterways as runoff, and escape into the air.
“Said Seeta Sistla, at California Polytechnic State University, ‘More and more plastics get left behind as more and more field seasons of single-use plastic come and go’. Sistla sampled fields in California’s coastal agricultural regions to measure macro- and microplastics in soils, and found more than 215,000 pieces of plastic per hectare. They also found that higher concentrations of plastics lowered the levels of crop-nourishing soil nutrients.” [click the link for the full article]
Venezuelans thought Trump was liberating them . . .
“Reports that the US is preparing to claim a big stake in Venezuela’s massive energy reserves have sparked an outcry, with critics describing the move as ‘predatory’ and a ‘rapacious’ land grab. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves with an estimated 303bn barrels, compared with Saudi Arabia’s 268bn and Iran’s 208bn.
“Trump officials were in ‘advanced talks’ with Venezuelan officials to take nearly a third of Venezuela’s energy reserves. The fields being negotiated were in the Orinoco Belt and Lake Maracaibo regions. Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the negotiations, said one deal under discussion was a 100-year lease on several oilfields.
“‘It’s a land grab – a massive land grab’, said one well-known opposition figure. ‘It’s revolting because this is not the United States of the Marshall plan. This is a rapacious, mafioso United States’, they added.” [click the link for the full article]
Lawsuit to force action on gray whales’ population crash
“Three conservation groups sent a notice of their intent to sue the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service for failing to issue a decision on Endangered Species Act protections for the Eastern North Pacific gray whale. The Eastern North Pacific gray whale population has declined by as much as 50% in the past decade.
“This population of gray whales was protected under the Endangered Species Act until it was declared recovered and delisted in 1994. Unfortunately, the gray whale recovery was short-lived. The Fisheries Service was required to decide by Aug. 24 whether listing this gray whale species under the Act is warranted.
“It couldn’t be clearer that the population needs protections, but we’re just getting silence from the Trump administration as the crisis unfolds’, said Miyoko Sakashita, at the Center for Biological Diversity. ‘Gray whales are washing up dead all along the West Coast’.
“Most of the recent dead gray whales were emaciated, likely because Arctic warming has limited their prey. The whales normally eat small animals such as amphipods, little shrimp-like crustaceans that live on the seafloor. The amphipods depend on a food chain that begins with sea ice. When sea ice melts earlier and forms later, less of the algae that amphipods eat reaches the seafloor.” [click the links for the full articles]
Happiness derives not by accumulation, but by sharing
“When I launched the ‘Institute for Studies in Happiness, Economy, and Society’ (ISHES) in 2011, I had initially intended to name it the ‘Institute for Degrowth Studies’. But Dennis Meadows, co-author of The Limits to Growth, advised ‘It’s better to put something positive — like happiness — in the name’.
“At ISHES, we study how societies can move beyond economic growth and build well-being within ecological limits. In Japan, much of what looks like degrowth in practice has emerged instead from adaptation to unavoidable realities: depopulation, aging, and the shrinking of rural economies.
“A useful way to organize the landscape is into three layers: ideas, lifestyle and community practices, and place-based cases.
“On the level of ideas, the most internationally visible figure is Kohei Saito, at the University of Tokyo. His book Capital in the Anthropocene was published in English in early 2024 as Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto. For the practical framing dilemma, questioning growth provokes the reaction, ‘So you want to stop the economy?’ — moving beyond a GDP-versus-happiness binary is useful.
“At the level of lifestyle and community practices, the examples become more concrete and transferable. Transition Town Fujino was one of the first fully functioning nodes of the UK-born Transition movement in Japan. Established in autumn 2008, it launched a local currency called Yorozuya, and after the Fukushima nuclear accident, its residents organized their own community power initiative.
“On the level of place-based cases, the standout is Ama Town, on the island of Nakanoshima in the Oki Islands. In the early 2000s, the town treated depopulation as an existential threat. [Now] its slogan, ‘Nai-Mono-Wa-Nai’ (‘what we don’t have, we do without’), carries a deliberate double meaning: we can live without material abundance and fashionable entertainment. Nature, community, a self-sufficient life is already here.” [click the link for the full article]
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