Stephan: The christofascists with their fear of the other, and of being replaced, whatever that means to each individual, have tried to limit immigration. In the 2019 Fortune 500 list 44.6 percent, or 223 companies, in the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children. Millions of Americans work for those immigrants who have created the jobs that sustain their families. By blocking immigrants we block our own advancement.
Credit: Amanda Northrop/Vox
Since the early 20th century, the US has been a world leader in innovation and technical progress. In recent decades, however, some experts have worried that the country’s performance on these has been slowing, even stalling.
There are many possible explanations for this phenomenon, but one has seemed especially salient in recent years: an immigration system that discourages, and often turns away, the most highly skilled and talented foreign workers.
Historically, immigrants have played a vital role in American innovation. As Jeremy Neufeld, an immigration policy fellow with the Institute for Progress, a new innovation-focused think tank, remarked to me, “It’s always been the case that immigrants have been a secret ingredient in US dynamism.” Robert Krol, a professor of economics with California State University Northridge, describes it this way: “The bottom line is that when you look at the impact of immigrants — whether you think about starting businesses or innovating patents — they have a large, significant impact.” of historical immigration patterns show that more migrants to […]
Stephan: The main challenge humanity faces, in my opinion, is the existential issue of what actually motivates most human decisions, and that is presently based on only one thing, profit. If we are to survive as a species we must change. All decisions must be based on the recognition that we live in a matrix of life, where all life is interconnected and interdependent, and all decisions are based first and foremost on choosing the option that is most compassionate and life-affirming, the decision that best fosters wellbeing at every level. If we cannot make this transition, I don't think we will survive.
An aerial view of deforestation from logging in Thailand. Credit: rich Carey / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Is market-based decision making compatible with a sustainable relationship between people and nature?
A new assessment from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found that decisions about nature are being made based on a narrow range of values that precipitate biodiversity loss.
“Biodiversity is being lost and nature’s contributions to people are being degraded faster now [than] at any other point in human history,” IPBES Chair Ana María Hernández Salgar said in a press release. “This is largely because our current approach to political and economic decisions does not sufficiently account for the diversity of nature’s values.”
The IPBES Assessment Report on the Diverse Conceptualization of the Multiple Values of Nature and Its Benefits was approved on Saturday by representatives of the organization’s 139 member states. The approval came days after the IPBES — which is considered the IPCC of biodiversity — approved another report showing just how much humanity relies on wild species. The most recent report is […]
Stephan: Yesterday I published a report and made my scathing comments about Manchin's blocking the Biden plan for climate change remediation. Today I publish a report showing that we are falling far short of our goals on emission reductions. What this means is that your children and their children, and we ourselves come to that, are going to have severely degraded lives because scum like Manchin and the Republicans when there was still time to do something chose to do nothing, or as little as possible
People cross a street emitting smoke in New York Credit: Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty
If Congress doesn’t act quickly to pass climate legislation, the U.S. will likely only meet a fraction of the goal of reducing emissions by 50 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade, a new report warns.
The Rhodium Group found that, without further action from Congress or state legislators, the U.S. is only on track to reduce emissions by 24 to 35 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. While this is marginally better than the reductions of merely 17 to 30 percent that the group found the country was on track for last year, it still falls “significantly short” of the U.S.’s Paris Agreement pledge and President Joe Biden’s goals, the report says.
The emission goal won’t even be met by 2035, the researchers found. The level of emissions reductions by 2035 under current legislation would still only be about 26 to 41 percent below 2005 levels, with greenhouse gas emissions “remain[ing] stubbornly high,” the group wrote.
Stephan: Something like 40 years ago two close friends, Christopher Bird, and Peter Tompkins, after writing the best seller Secret Life of Plants, wrote a second book together Secrets of the Soil, in which they argued and presented evidence showing that humanity's future was tied to the quality of microorganisms in the soil. At the time futurists and people from the industrial chemical monoculture industry that dominated farming in the United States sneered at both books, but particularly Secrets of the Soil. Subsequent research, however, has proven how prescient both books were, and as climate change shapes the planet's matrix of life, the importance of those microorganisms is indeed proving to be the key to humanity's wellbeing. Here is some important information on this topic.
Often overlooked, diverse microbes are the key to healthy soil. How will a warming planet affect them, and what can farmers do to mitigate some of those changes?
Most creatures used to illustrate the tragedy of climate change are the familiar variety: Polar bears. Monarch butterflies. Sea turtles. Our soil, however, is often overlooked—it’s teeming with billions of microscopic organisms that comprise the most biodiverse environment on Earth. Like all living things, they’re affected by climate change, too.
There’s a fact that frequently gets mentioned when people talk about soil: There are more microorganisms in a teaspoon of healthy soil than there are people on Earth.
The matrix of living creatures that recycle plant and animal life is incredibly complex, with bacteria, protozoa, fungi, actinomycetes, nematodes and others interacting in countless, largely-unmapped ways. And so, how might drought, excess rainfall, heat and increased CO2 affect those relationships?
Soil microorganisms are the foundation of all life on earth, so it’s a vital question for everyone. If the microbes are out of whack, everything else will be too. But for farmers, it’s particularly crucial. Conventional agriculture, […]
Stephan: This, I think, is sadly true. It is part of the oligarch takeover trend that has happened in the United States.
Illustration by Sebastian Koenig
Ten years ago, I wrote an essay called “The Busy Trap,” about the curse of “busyness” that seemed endemic at the time. The treadmill had been imperceptibly increasing its speed for a while, and people were nervously starting to notice. As happens with a lot of unavoidable evils, they tried to rebrand their frantic busyness as a virtue. “Busy — so busy, crazy busy,” was the answer you got whenever you asked how they were. I came out, in my essay, as anti-busy; I advocated idling, daydreaming, hanging out and goofing off. My conclusion: “Life is too short to be busy.”
I guess a lot of other people had been thinking the same thing. For a few days, that essay was the thing everyone linked to, reposted and emailed. Other writers got paid to write responses to it. Someone even “debunked” it, as though it were a fake Bigfoot film. Entrepreneurial self-help gurus cited it and invited me to conferences. “The Colbert Report” even called, but I was unreachable in the Idaho […]
