ATHENS-In the days ahead, I would suggest that we all consider the advice of Lesson #1 from Yale professor Timothy Snyder's book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
"Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. […] A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."
Tim Stevenson...
Tim Stevenson is a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions from Athens ([email protected]) and is the author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (Green Writers Press), and Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Societal Collapse (Apocryphile Press).
Tim Stevenson, a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions, is author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (Green Writers Press) and Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Societal Collapse (Apocryphile Press). Contact him at [email protected]. ATHENS-The fix...
By way of taking to task Tim Wessel for criticizing those of us who are righteously standing up against Israel's genocidal assault upon the people of Gaza, I offer the following. People need to remember that our opposition is part of a growing worldwide condemnation of Israel's behavior as an outlaw state, including the United Nation's International Court of Justice finding this past January that Israel was "plausibly" perpetuating genocide in Gaza, and thus ordering its government to "take measures...
The current state of the climate is in a "code red for humanity." So stated the August 2021 report of the United Nation's authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). As the U.N.'s secretary-general, António Guterres, noted, "The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable." The only way we can avoid going beyond the internationally agreed threshold of 1.5 degrees C of global heating - which we are "perilously close" to exceeding - is by "stepping up our...
I have always found Bill McKibben to be an inspiring and committed climate activist, as well as just one of those special people in the world, a truly decent human being. What I have especially appreciated about him, however, is his ability to present a credible balance between realistic possibilities for change while at the same time offering a no-bull assessment of our current climate situation. But in his otherwise-fine and aptly entitled essay "Global Temps Not Just Off the...
Tuesday, Nov. 8 will be a most significant day in the history of our nation. Though a midterm election, it nevertheless could determine which party controls Congress and, therefore, determine whether we continue as a democracy - or whether we succumb to the undisguised attempts on the part of the Republican Party to eliminate our democracy in all but name. The British paper The Guardian recently observed that the United States “is seeing a dizzying number of assaults on democracy.”
As the daily evidence of scientific reports and graphic images of fires, floods, droughts, and people on the move vividly testify to, we are either in or rapidly approaching what scientists call “hothouse Earth,” a condition where climate feedbacks could lead to runaway heating. The series of increasingly catastrophic climate-related events that have occurred this summer clearly suggest we are rapidly approaching the point beyond which human mitigation efforts are not possible. As Bill McKibben wrote a few years ago,