B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

La aritmética del fuego Por la Dra. Lebohang Liepollo Pheko Nos dijeron que enfriáramos las llamas mientras seguían incendiando el mundo. Llamaron amor a nuestro trabajo, deber a nuestro agotamiento, nuestra desolación y nuestro despojo se convirtieron en «desarrollo».

¿Quién cuida el fuego? Enfriar las llamas sin extinguir el fuego Por la Dra. Lebohang Liepollo Pheko I. Las economías que nos consumen Nos dijeron que enfriáramos las llamas mientras seguían incendiando el mundo. Llamaron amor a nuestro trabajo,

Who Tends the Fire? Cooling the Flames Without Extinguishing the Fire By Dr Lebohang Liepollo Pheko I. The economies that consume us They told us to cool the flames while they were still setting the world alight. They called our labour love, our exhaustion duty,

Donde los sueños de nuestres ancestres se encuentran con las memorias de nuestres descendientes: reflexiones sobre la construcción de lo común, el abolicionismo y las reparaciones Por Alison Chopel Introducción Hay dos corrientes del movimiento por la justicia racial en Estados Unidos con las que estoy comprometida y que, a primera vista, parecen dirigir su atención hacia distintas direcciones temporales: las reparaciones o justicia reparativa y el abolicionismo. Les activistas y académicue…

La forma básica que debe adoptar una sociedad alternativa sostenible y justa Por Ted Trainer Introducción Actualmente existe un amplio reconocimiento de que los sistemas actuales no solo no funcionan bien para nosotres, sino que también están generando una policrisis global que pronto deberá desembocar en un colapso mundial catastrófico. Existen numerosas propuestas sobre la naturaleza de un sistema más sostenible y justo. Quiero argumentar que, cuando se comprende adecuadamente la naturale…

Some bees line their nests with soft petals. Some line them with hardened tree sap. Some line them with a thin, flexible film composed of silk and polyester. And this latter group—known as cellophane bees—may hold the key to sustainable, biodegradable plastic, according to a new study.

“Nature has already solved a problem that polymer scientists are still working on: a bioplastic that is chemically and physically similar to conventional plastics but doesn’t persist in the environment,” says study team member Jonathan Coote, assistant professor in the Department of Sustainable Biomaterials at Virginia Tech University.

Unlike more familiar hive-dwelling honeybees, cellophane bees nest in the soil. Females lay eggs in individual chambers that they line with secretions from a gland on their abdomen. Scientists have known for almost half a century that this lining is composed of silk fibers and a polyester similar to polyethylene—a material that makes up about one-third of human-produced plastics and is the most commonly used plastic for packaging.

“Polyethylene-like polyesters made in the lab generally don’t break down well in the environment,” says Coote. “The bees’ material, however, breaks down rapidly in soil.” Although the bees nest in aggregations of 10,000 or more individual nests and often use the same nest sites for decades, their habitat never becomes choked with plastic—in contrast to large aggregations of modern humans.

To find out more about how the bees do it, Coote and his collaborators gathered nest linings from two Tennessee nest sites of a species of cellophane bee known as Colletes inaequalis. They put the material through a battery of tests to characterize its structure and chemical makeup. They also collected nest linings that had been in the ground for four, seven, and 11 months to track how the material degrades over time.

 

.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl , .IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {height: auto;position: relative;}.IRPP_ruby , .IRPP_ruby:hover , .IRPP_ruby:visited , .IRPP_ruby:active {border:0!important;}.IRPP_ruby .clearfix:after {content: "";display: table;clear: both;}.IRPP_ruby {display: block;transition: background-color 250ms;webkit-transition: background-color 250ms;width: 100%;opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: #eaeaea;}.IRPP_ruby:active , .IRPP_ruby:hover {opacity: 1;transition: opacity 250ms;webkit-transition: opacity 250ms;background-color: inherit;}.IRPP_ruby .postImageUrl {background-position: center;background-size: cover;float: left;margin: 0;padding: 0;width: 31.59%;position: absolute;top: 0;bottom: 0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text-area {float: right;width: 65.65%;padding:0;margin:0;}.IRPP_ruby .centered-text {display: table;height: 130px;left: 0;top: 0;padding:0;margin:0;padding-top: 20px;padding-bottom: 20px;}.IRPP_ruby .IRPP_ruby-content {display: table-cell;margin: 0;padding: 0 74px 0 0px;position: relative;vertical-align: middle;width: 100%;}.IRPP_ruby .ctaText {border-bottom: 0 solid #fff;color: #0099cc;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .postTitle {color: #000000;font-size: 16px;font-weight: 600;letter-spacing: normal;margin: 0;padding: 0;font-family:'Arial';}.IRPP_ruby .ctaButton {background: url(https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts-pro/assets/images/next-arrow.png)no-repeat;background-color: #afb4b6;background-position: center;display: inline-block;height: 100%;width: 54px;margin-left: 10px;position: absolute;bottom:0;right: 0;top: 0;}.IRPP_ruby:after {content: "";display: block;clear: both;}Recommended Reading:There’s no such thing as a free polymer. The tradeoff at the heart of bioplastics.

 

A fresh nest cell lining is about 73% polyester and 27% silk by weight, the researchers report. The polyester is semicrystalline, likely has cross-linked polymer chains, and has a crystal structure and degradation temperature similar to that of polyethylene.

“The biggest surprise was that the material is most likely cross-linked, meaning its polymer chains are chemically tied together into a network,” says Coote. “Cross-linked plastics, called thermosets, are typically very durable, and designing thermosets that break down at the end of their life is a major challenge in polymer science. So finding a thermoset that breaks down rapidly in soil was very counterintuitive, and it’s exciting to have a natural example to learn from.”

By four months, the nest linings are just 40% polyester, meaning that the polyester degrades even more rapidly than famously biodegradable silk in the first months (after that, the composition changes much more slowly). Four-month-old nest linings remain flexible and intact, protecting the nest cell from moisture and microbes like a shrink-wrapped bell pepper at the grocery store. By seven months, about the time the larva has developed into an adult bee, the lining easily cracks easily; by 11 months, it crumbles in the hand.

In other words, unlike that bell pepper’s shrink wrap, the nest lining lasts just as long as is needed to protect the developing bee, and no longer.

The researchers next aim to investigate how the material breaks down so quickly. They hypothesize that the particularities of polyester’s crystal structure may leave the bonds that connect the material’s subunits exposed to a greater degree than in other polyesters. There’s also evidence of an enzyme that breaks these bonds present in the nest lining, perhaps from the mother bee’s saliva.

“The goal is to reverse engineer what the bees are doing so that we can design similar materials in the lab and eventually produce them at practical scale,” Coote says.

Source: Coote J.P., et al. “Rapid soil degradation of a cross-linked, semicrystalline polyethylene-like polyester produced by Colletes bees.” PNAS 2026.

Image: Laura Russo.

COP31 marks a critical juncture in the global effort to translate diplomatic pledges into tangible climate action. 

At the start of the Iran conflict, the price of sulfur was about $500 per metric ton for sulfur originating from the Middle East. It now sits above $800.

The economizing individual knows how to relish what one has, delight in the savvy of frugality, and thrive while doing so.

At a time when accountability and transparency are especially important for Kentucky Power customers, the Kentucky Public Service Commission’s decision to deny intervention status to the Mountain Association, Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, and Kentuckians For The Commonwealth in its audit of Kentucky Power is disappointing because it limits how we can contribute to the process. 

For nearly a decade, the Mountain Association and our partners have formally intervened in utility cases affecting Eastern Kentucky. We’ve participated because the people we serve are directly affected by the outcomes. From small businesses and nonprofits to local governments, volunteer fire departments, and families struggling with high energy bills, we bring perspectives that might otherwise go unheard. 

Intervention in most PSC cases allows stakeholders to formally participate in a case by filing testimony, presenting evidence, conducting discovery, and helping build the official record. Those tools help ensure that decision-makers hear from the customers who live with the consequences of those decisions every day, versus just the utilities or groups like the Kentucky Industrial Utilities Customers who has been increasingly partnering with the Kentucky Attorney General to jointly intervene. 

In this case, we wanted to intervene to be able to review the Request For Proposals (RFP) and give our input in scope and selection of an auditor. The audit was called for by the Public Service Commission this July 2026 following their most recent rate increase case.

Kentucky Power serves more than 160,000 customers in far Eastern Kentucky. Their customers face some of the highest electric bills in the state, and many households in the region already struggle with significant energy burdens and low income. Kentucky Power has raised their rates four times in ten years. In that time, residential rates have risen 75% and small commercial rates have risen 35%. An audit of the company’s operations and management is an important opportunity to examine why these repeated, significant rate increases are needed and what the company can do differently to better protect its customers who aren’t able to just take their business elsewhere. 

“We appreciate that the PSC has directed the selected auditor to engage with stakeholder groups as part of determining the audit’s scope, but there is an important distinction between being interviewed and being a party to the proceeding,” said Robin Gabbard, President of Mountain Association. “The people who pay those bills should have a meaningful role in that conversation and our role as an intervenor would have centered those voices.” 

While we may not have been granted formal intervention, we will continue bringing those voices forward throughout this audit process and in the other cases our Energy Team continues to intervene in on behalf of Eastern Kentuckians.  

To learn more about our history of utility intervention, please visit our Policy webpage:  https://mtassociation.org/policy  

The post Why Formal Intervention Matters in the Kentucky Power Audit  appeared first on Mountain Association.

From Gaza to Indigenous dispossession, cultural erasure, and the failures of mainstream climate politics, de Ploeg exposes how power disguises destruction as progress, security, or sustainability.

Years of extraction-industry propaganda are weeks from paying off, thanks to two powerful Senate Democrats.

New research shows that seagrass depends on the bacteria around it—and that the antibiotics entering our oceans could disrupt that relationship.

The movement to end seasonal time changes may be gaining momentum — but what would it mean for the safety of vulnerable road users?

The perennial debate over whether or not to roll back the clocks on the first Sunday in November hit a milestone this summer when the House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which would get rid of the fall and winter’s “standard time” hours and adopt spring and summer’s “daylight savings time” hours year-round.

That would effectively mean that Americans with nine-to-five work schedules would leave for their jobs in darker conditions on the shortest days of the year, in exchange for up to an extra hour of sunshine after work — with accompanying tradeoffs for U.S. travel patterns.

The bill has since stalled in the Senate transportation committee, but its proponents — which include nothing less than President Trump himself — claim that it still deserves serious consideration for its potential to encourage outdoor recreation in the evenings, and to narrow the likely window for nighttime crime.

Its potential to reduce traffic crashes, though, has been hotly debated for years, particularly among people who advocate for the safety of people outside cars.

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Since the concept of “standard time” arrived in 1883, North America’s transportation landscape has profoundly shaped our country’s approach to setting our clocks.

That’s because prior to the proliferation of railroads, U.S. residents observed a staggering 144 different local times that needed to be at least somewhat standardized into four standard mainland “zones” once communities were linked together by trains — at least until Daylight Savings Time came along and confused matters more.

Originally intended as an effort to conserve some of the energy used for indoor lighting at night during the first and second world wars, DST stubbornly hung on in some (but not all) U.S. states after the conflicts ended. That created an inconsistent map of varying temporal rules that still persists in part today, despite efforts to bring order to the chaos with the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Hawaii, Arizona, and US territories around the world still refuse to change their clocks, despite the fact that the other 48 states all do it.

Recommended Research: Permanent Daylight Savings Time Could Save Human and Animal Lives on Our Roads Kea Wilson November 9, 2022

Now, most U.S. residents say they’d prefer to skip the hassle of resetting their microwaves twice a year — though they split on which of the two seasonal adjustments they’d prefer to give up.

And the research isn’t clear on which one would be better for safety, either.

A 2022 study on which this website reported, for instance, found that not rolling clocks back in the winter could save at least 33 human lives and 36,550 deer in car-on-cervidae collisions every year, since drivers would get back a little more daylight for their evening commutes before nocturnal ungulates began crossing highways as part of their evening migration patterns.

Meanwhile, a 2025 study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggested that change could have an even more dramatic safety benefit for drivers, since “fatal crashes among motor-vehicle occupants decreased in the 5 weeks after the fall time change (-7.1%) and increased in the 5 weeks after the springtime change (+12%).”  

Disturbingly, though, the opposite was true for fatal crashes among pedestrians and bicyclists. Their death tolls surged 13 percent after clocks fell back in the fall — and dipped 24 percent after they sprang forward in the spring.

Recommended Dusk and Dawn Are Deadly for Walkers — But Traffic Pros Don’t Know the Full Extent of It Kea Wilson May 11, 2022

IIHS researcher Amber Woods said no single variable fully explained that contradiction, though “for bicyclists and pedestrians, the biggest factor appears to be the changing light conditions during key driving periods.”

Drivers, by contrast, may get more drowsy in the springtime when they lose an hour of sleep to the time change, and may drive better in the fall when they abruptly gain one; they also might be less inclined to speed on sometimes-icy late fall roads than they are to hit the gas on dry spring streets when they slept through an alarm.

Data isn’t yet available on how this past weekend’s change impacted roadway death totals,  — though considering that it gave Halloween revelers an extra hour to party on a Saturday night, the news isn’t expected to be good, particularly given the holiday’s association with increased drunk driving and phone distraction. And there’s no telling how many other confounding factors may complicate the picture of what time changes more broadly might mean for road safety.

“These findings won’t end the debate about daylight saving time,” IIHS President David Harkey said in a release. “The benefits for bicyclists and pedestrians are important because that’s where the fatality numbers have increased the most over the past decade. However, they’re largely offset by an increase in crashes in which vehicle occupants were killed.”

Recommended The Other Reason American Pedestrian Deaths are Rising After Dark Kea Wilson December 11, 2023

Of course, Vision Zero advocates argue that since all road deaths are preventable, it’s not enough to just pick the time change that nets out to the fewest casualties overall — and certainly not to offer people outside cars as sacrificial lambs. Rather, we must reckon with the fact that three quarters of pedestrian deaths happen in the dark no matter what number appears on the clock — and take an aggressive, systemic approach to saving those lives.

That means we have to do the obvious things, like installing streetlights, HAWK signals, and other infrastructure to make pedestrians and bicyclists more visible after sunset. Redesigning roads and cars to slow motorists to less-deadly speeds when they do crash is essential, too, as is doing more to limit the functionality of distracting cell phone features when drivers are behind the wheel — particularly when time changes coincide with major holidays that tempt motorists to text about their party plans.

But it also means thinking more expansively about how our national street safety epidemic and our national epidemic of car dependency reinforce one another — particularly after nightfall.

And that means addressing the suburbanization of poverty that has late-shift workers schelpping home along busy arterials after the bus stops running. It means dismantling an unsustainable work culture where drivers have to rush to punch a clock even when they’re too exhausted from a time change to drive, and where few have the freedom to leave their jobs to travel home at a safer daylight hour. It means taking dedicated action to stop hit-and-runs, which spike after dark and disproportionately injure people outside of automobiles.

And it certainly means providing more mobility alternatives, like increased nighttime transit service, if only to halt the cycle of unwalkability that leaves so many vulnerable road users traveling alone at night.

However we do it, it’s time to shine a light on the unique dangers of walking and biking after dark — and stop pretending that ditching seasonal time changes will make a significant difference if we don’t.

Streetsblog reported this summer  that Waymo robotaxis were involved in 68 percent fewer police-reportable crashes than human drivers, according to an independent Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study. That is meaningful progress. The same article also made the limitation of crash statistics clear: they do not capture problems such as vehicles blocking bike lanes or emergency responders, passing school buses, or creating other street-level hazards.

That gap matters now. In July, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warned that it had identified a pattern of driverless vehicles interfering with law enforcement and other first responders. Later that month, NHTSA said it was accelerating development of the first federal performance standards for automated vehicles.

But those standards should cover more than whether a robotaxi can drive well in ordinary conditions. They should also make automakers spell out what the vehicle is allowed to do when the street stops behaving like the test course.

‘Safer on average’ — but not at every moment

A robotaxi can be safer than a human driver overall and still create a serious problem in an unusual situation.

An ambulance may need it to clear an intersection. A police officer may wave traffic through in a way that conflicts with the usual signal. A construction worker may direct cars around an obstruction. A cyclist may have to move around a vehicle stopped where it should not be.

These situations involve driving skill, but they also involve limits. The vehicle needs rules for when it can act on its own, when it must slow or stop, and when a person with legitimate authority can override its normal behavior.

Those rules should be part of the safety test.

Regulators do not need access to every line of software. They need evidence that the vehicle recognizes situations outside its normal playbook, takes a safe default action, and gives authorized people a reliable way to intervene.

Make the limits a part of the test

Believe it or not, NHTSA can build exceptional situations into the performance standards already under development.

First, manufacturers must identify high-risk road conditions in which ordinary driving rules may conflict with emergency directions, temporary street conditions, or the safety of people outside the vehicle. Next, they should demonstrate what the vehicle will do in each case — and what happens when its confidence drops.

Remote assistance also needs clear limits. A remote operator who helps a stuck vehicle should have defined powers rather than an open-ended ability to make anything happen. Regulators should know what actions a remote helper can authorize, how those actions are logged, and how quickly the authority can be withdrawn if something goes wrong.

This idea has a broader foundation in AI research. A peer reviweed analysis of explainable artificial intelligence by Plamen Angelov and colleagues highlights “knowledge limits” as a core principle: a system should identify situations it was not designed to handle reliably.

The transportation version is one of the more concrete samples. A robotaxi should know when the situation has moved beyond ordinary driving — and follow a tested procedure for what comes next.

Give road users a visible safety contract

The public does not need a technical manual. Cities, regulators, and road users need a plain-language safety contract that explains how robotaxis behave around first responders, temporary traffic control, blocked lanes, school buses, cyclists, pedestrians, and other predictable exceptions.

That would strengthen the case for automated driving rather than weaken it. Better crash performance deserves recognition. Clear limits make that performance more trustworthy because people can see what happens when averages stop being useful and the street presents the system with an exception.

The next generation of AV safety standards should therefore test two things together: how well the vehicle drives, and how safely it behaves when ordinary rules no longer tell the whole story.

• The Trump administration’s announced policy tying transit grants to marriage and birth rates will only serve to hold up projects even further, and to funnel more money to rural counties that need it less than denser areas. (Transportation for America)
• One reason why U.S. cities have too much parking is that people feel like there’s never enough even when plenty is available, according to Paul Supawanich. And of course, all that parking is never free, even if the big-box store doesn’t charge customers directly.
• On the eve of Election Day, Smart Growth America highlights past ballot victories for complete streets.
• Whether California can set its own emissions standards could hinge on the outcome of tomorrow’s elections. (Politico)
• Prop 319 would ban traffic enforcement cameras in Arizona. (KTAR)
• An ICE agent was charged with aggravated assault in Houston for using his SUV to run over a man fleeing on foot. (Jezebel)
• Fort Worth and TEXRail officials broke ground on a light rail extension to the city’s medical district. (Report)
• CityNerd examines how you go about fixing sprawl in a city like Las Vegas that barely existed until the automobile era.
• Jacksonville has not always been using gas tax revenue set aside for bike and pedestrian projects for its intended purpose. (First Coast News)
• Four-minute peak frequencies are driving ridership on Seattle’s busiest light rail segment. (The Urbanist)
• London Mayor Sadiq Khan is calling for a cap on robotaxis. (The Guardian)
• Dozens of people in Toronto spent their Halloween protesting the Ontario government removing bike lanes. (CBC)

Where the dreams of our ancestors meet the memories of our descendants: Reflections on commoning, abolition and reparations By Alison Chopel Introduction There are two currents in the US-based racial justice movement that I am committed to which seem, at surface, to stretch their attention in different temporal directions: reparations or reparative justice and abolitionism. Reparations activists and scholars observe that to move toward a less violent society that can truly break from the ho…

WEAVING ALTERNATIVES #21: A periodical of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives Weaving Economies for Life Solidarity Economy, Commons, Care and Pluriversal Futures November 2026 Editorial Note Solidarity Economy: A Historical Overview Melanie E L Bush and Nokuthula HlabanganeAlternativesAlternativesWeavers

Who Tends the Fire? and The Arithmetic of Fire By Dr Lebohang Liepollo Pheko Cooling the Flames Without Extinguishing the Fire Who Tends the Fire? I. The economies that consume us They told us to cool the flames while they were still setting the world alight.

Food accounts for a third of humanity’s greenhouse emissions. And sure enough, the most carbon-gushing foods are also the ones that tend to be the worst for our health, such as meats and dairy. So what if we tried taxing that carbon, to nudge people toward higher-plant diets that are healthier for people and planet alike?

A new study in Nature Food explores how these food emissions taxes could be applied to countries around the world with different levels of wealth and greenhouse emissions. It shows how they could be tweaked to manage the delicate interplay between food prices, poverty, hunger, and health—while still cutting billions of tons of annual emissions.

Economists have estimated that growing populations and increasing meat consumption worldwide could cause the environmental footprint of our food—including greenhouse emissions—to balloon by 50 to 90 percent by 2050. This has spurred recommendations that humanity shift its diet, toward fewer animals and more plants.

Emissions taxes paid by consumers buying foods are one way to encourage a shift away from meats, dairy, eggs, and sugars. But questions remain about how those taxes can be applied fairly to countries around the world—given that wealthier nations have more ability to pay them, and that many of these same nations also contributed disproportionately to rising greenhouse gases in the first place.

In the new study, researchers used economic, trade, and public health models to predict how well different types of taxes would curb greenhouse emissions—and also, how they would impact food prices and human health around the world.

 

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They compared two tax scenarios. In one, emissions are priced the same worldwide, at a constant cost of USD$ 185 per metric ton of CO2 equivalent (tCO2eq). In this system, wealthy countries would still pay more taxes, because their food systems emit more tons of CO2. In the other system, the cost-per-ton of emissions is scaled up or down, based on each country’s wealth—thereby further increasing the taxes paid by consumers in wealthy countries (to as much as $969 per tCO2eq), while reducing those paid by lower-wealth countries (to as little as $21 per tCO2eq). The researchers compared these two scenarios both with and without a second provision, in which governments would also subsidize fruits and vegetables to further lower the prices that consumers pay for these low-carbon foods.

Their results suggest that taxes based on a fixed-price-per-ton would reduce food-related emissions most sharply—by up to 18.7 percent, or about 2.6 billion tCO2eq worldwide each year. But such taxes would likely worsen overall health in some countries such as India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam—even after accounting for reductions in heart disease and diabetes—because they might make food less affordable to some people, compromising nutrition.

The authors found that adjusting the price-per-ton of emissions based on national wealth would lessen this problem. And subsidizing the cost of fruits and vegetables would further decrease it. Together these two tweaks slightly reduced the emissions that were prevented—but they were still predicted to cut worldwide food emissions by 17 percent, or about 2.3 billion tCO2eq per year.

The authors recommended that these efforts to reduce the negative impacts on the poor could be further explored, with detailed studies of poverty in individual countries, and potentially by excluding some critical sustenance foods such as fish or rice from the taxes in some countries.

Bouyssou, et al. “Food emissions taxes can deliver health and environmental benefits with limited leakage.” Nature Food, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine