Resources

Environmental

Knowledge Base

Activists

  • Institute for Energy and Resource Management (IeRM)

    This project works to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases through changes in the sources of energy, better management of resources, the replacement of plastics with more environmentally friendly products, the reduction of single-use items, and a higher rate of reuse and recycling. We do this through demonstration projects, public education, advocacy, and partnerships with similar organizations. Our emphasis is on sound science and proven solutions.

  • Earth Prayer — “a loosely-knit interfaith community of supportive friends, organized as self-supervising Teams of Two, seeking to live the ideals of reverence for Life and Earth as a spiritual path and Earth/Universe kinship/citizenship (what many writers have called eco-spirituality, the “Great Turning” and “Creation Spirituality,” the journey from isolation to interwovenness). Taken together, all the materials on this site point toward eco-spirituality as an interfaith green dharma, a deep green awakening, a vision of caring for the web of life of which we ourselves are an expression.”

  • Future Coalition — Founded in 2018 by youth activists, for youth activists, Future Coalition is a national network for youth-led organizations and youth organizers across the country.Future Coalition’s team is youth-led and intergenerational. As the youth arm of March On, we work across organizing spaces and generations in order to build and sustain grassroots power.

  • Fridays for Future — is a youth-led and -organised global climate strike movement started in August 2018, when 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began a school strike for climate. Initially alone, she was soon joined by others, and they decided to continue striking until Swedish policies provided a safe pathway well under 2° C, i.e. Their call for action sparked an international awakening, with students and activists uniting around the globe to protest outside their local parliaments and city halls. Along with other groups across the world, Fridays for Future is part of a hopeful new wave of change, inspiring millions to take action on the climate crisis, and we want you to become one of us!

  • SustainUS | US Youth for Justice and Sustainability — We are not here to return to the status quo, but to transform this moment to make way for a better world. A national youth-led organization focused on global climate issues, SustainUS sends youth delegates to international climate negotiations and other decision-making forums to fight for climate justice. We carry experiences of people in the so-called U.S., the stolen land that we are settled on, and acknowledge these multifaceted identities in our work. SustainUS, like our country, is made up of people with lineages across nations, and we embody this knowing towards a world that sustains all of us. 

  • Extinction Rebellion — “a decentralised, international and politically non-partisan movement using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency…OUR VALUES: Regenerative culture includes a healthy focus on mutually supporting categories of:... Self-care: how we take care of our own needs and personal recovery from this toxic system. Action care: how we take care of each other whilst we undertake direct actions and civil disobedience together. Interpersonal care: how we take care of the relationships we have, being mindful of how we affect each other, taking charge of our side of relationships… We actively mitigate for power. Breaking down hierarchies of power for more equitable participation.”

Articles/Essays/Op-eds

  • Can we save the planet by shrinking the economy? Kelsey Piper. “The ‘degrowth’ movement to fight the climate crisis offers a romantic, utopian vision. But it’s not a policy agenda.”

  • Burn fewer fossil fuels? Great. Here's a ripple effect, Marty Mulvihill, Gretta Goldenman and Arlene Blum. “The petrochemical industry still wants to make money and will turn to plastics and toxic chemicals. These issues must be addressed together. As the United States comes to grips with the climate crisis, fossil fuels will slowly recede from being primary sources of energy. That’s the good news. But the bad news is that the petrochemical industry is counting on greatly increasing the production of plastics and toxic chemicals made from fossil fuels to profit from its reserves of oil and gas…” (read more)

  • The Convivial Society, L.M. Sacacas. A newsletter. “…some of the interests that inform my thinking: the centrality of the body, how technologies mediate experience, and how they frame and challenge our moral projects. Most of us have some understanding of what a just society and the good life entail; I think it’s critically important to understand how technology relates to both…”

  • Green New Deal — House Resolution 109 - February 7, 2019 — “… providing all people of the United States with —

    o   (i) high-quality health care;

    o   (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing;

    o   (iii) economic security; and

    o   (iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.”

  • It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn, Ezra Klein. “…Decades of climate activism got millions of people into the streets but they haven’t turned the tide on emissions or investments. Citing the journal Nature, Malm observes that, measuring by capacity, 49% of the fossil-fuel-burning energy infrastructure was installed after 2004. Add in expected emissions from projects in planning, and we are well toward warming the world by 2 degrees Celsius — a terrifying prospect most world governments pledged to avoid. Hope was that Covid would alter the world’s course, but it hasn’t. Oil consumption is back to precrisis levels, and demand for coal, the dirtiest of fuels, is rising…” (read more)

  • Our Hidden Wound, Gene Logsdon. "Most of us grew up in a society where farmer was often merely a synonym for moron, and I am quite sure that many farmers are still haunted by feelings of inferiority laid on them by urban and urbane prejudice. I suspect that many competent farmers among us continue to expand their farm empires not out of greed or an insatiable desire for wealth, but because they feel compelled to prove again and again that they are not inferior to anyone. They want to cram that fact as far down the throats of their boyhood taunters as they can, and, sadly, they spend their lives doing it."

  • Wendell Berry’s High Horse, (behind paywall), Verlyn Klinkenborg. [A review of What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry, 1969–2017.] An evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of Berry’s writing. In a note, Klinkenborg comments: “A surefire antidote for this unease has been reading the work of Berry’s long-time friend Gene Logsdon. He says much of what Berry says, but he says it as if he’s talking directly to you instead of gazing into the middle distance.”

  • The Social Life of Forests, (behind paywall), Ferris Jabr. “Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?… Humans are not the only species that inherits the infrastructure of past communities.... A passage from “The Overstory” suddenly sprouted in my consciousness: ‘There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.’” [A link to the podcast is embedded in the story.]

  • Wealthier, Whiter Areas Are More Likely to Get Help After Fires, Data Show, (behind paywall), Christopher Flavelle. “New research offers further signs that racial and economic inequality leave some Americans more exposed to the worsening effects of climate change.”

  • Al Gore: Where I Find Hope, (behind paywall), Al Gore. “The Biden administration will have the opportunity to restore confidence in America and take on the worsening climate crisis…. Still, all of these positive developments fall far short of the emissions reductions required. The climate crisis is getting worse faster than we are deploying solutions.”

  • Why Don’t We Just Make Everything Out of Recycled Plastic?, Kaleigh Rogers. “It’s a complicated question, but very smart people are working to solve it.”

  • What Have We Done to the Whale?, Amia Srinivasan. “The creatures once symbolized our efforts to save the planet; now they demonstrate all the ways we have devastated it.... Driven by a search for the perfectly ‘grammable’ shot, ecotourism is everywhere on the rise, though it rarely delivers on the promise of its name, which is to reconcile the impulse to consume nature with the desire to conserve it.”

  • Stopping Climate Change Is Hopeless. Let’s Do It, (behind paywall), Auden Schendler and Andrew P. Jones. “Perhaps the rewards of solving climate change are so compelling, so nurturing and so natural a piece of the human soul that we can’t help but do it.”

  • What Is Animal Cruelty and How Can We Stop it For Good?, Sentient Media. “Understanding animal cruelty is one of the first steps to stopping it from occurring. By being aware of what is happening in your community, donating your time or other resources, being cognizant of the products you purchase and making sure that the children in your life know proper animal care, you can help stop animal suffering.”

  • A Future Without Fossil Fuels? Bill McKibben. “At what point does a new technology cause an existing industry to start losing significant value?

    This may turn out to be the most important economic and political question of the first half of this century, and the answer might tell us much about our chances of getting through the climate crisis without completely destroying the planet.”

Books

  • Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries To Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (1957), Gary Snyder

Videos

Podcasts

  • Richard Powers on What We Can Learn from Trees, with Ezra Klein.

    Ezra Klein: We live in a system that is always changing us — that our current technologies, our current culture, our current economic system, the religious systems we have and don’t have are rewiring our brains and reshaping our souls and always expanding or contracting the limits of our empathy…

    Richard Powers: I was concerned as a younger writer, in my 20s and 30s and 40s, with the human sciences that amplify our ability to control and master and manipulate our situation here and to understand ourselves. And in my 50s and 60s, I’ve become interested in the humbling sciences, I guess I would say, that point our attention away from ourselves and onto other living things… into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place… to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation...

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