The big systems transformations required to avoid the worst climate change scenarios, as laid out in the IPCC (2018) report, mean many aspects of our lives and relationships will change. Many activists, scholars, and advocates of change suggest this requires us as individuals, and communities big and small, to understand
News headlines have recently been preparing us for the next great crisis of the coronavirus pandemic: lack of Christmas presents due to supply chain chaos. Even though it would be wonderful if the only crisis we faced was having less toys in midwinter, the supply chain disruptions that persist into
The peoples of Canada have been confronted with a long-term and unresolved housing crisis, and North Hastings, Ontario, faces an intensified housing crisis in the form of increasing homelessness, precarious housing, so-called couch-surfing, and dramatic house price inflation. Most proposed solutions to this crisis treat the problems of a lack
Storytelling is often considered a critical aspect of human cultures. We communicate information, ideas, hopes, worldview, and warnings to each other through story in all sorts of parts of our lives. We encounter storytelling, or narratives, of change regularly when we read science fiction or speculative fiction, when we hear
In this Long Talks session, invited speaker Jen Gobby will share what she has learned about theories of change. Jen’s approach to knowledge creation is though theorizing collectively from the ground up with activists, organizers, land defenders and others actively involved in fighting for a more just and ecologically
Our economic system is built on a belief that it can grow forever. More people, spending more money, on more things is promoted as the common cure to our economic troubles, social injustices, and environmental problems. But this myopic belief depends on socializing the costs of growth to the many,
This session is about change. How we understand change, what we think can be changed, and where we fit into making change are all part of deeply politicized debates happening as we speak at intersections of the global ecological crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the global pandemic. The
An indigenist perspective. As we look at a world around us engulfed by arctic fires, oil wars, unacknowledged genocides, and rampant police lynchings, we often see many battles to face and wonder which one to choose. This Indigenist perspective hopes to bring together how each of these (seemingly) singular social
Our economies are embedded in webs of global trade, but as we quickly awaken to the limits of globalization under the constraints of COVID-19 and ecological breakdown – and the endurance of local trade – there are compelling reasons to position ourselves to live more locally. In addition to concerns about ecological
Talking about the global economy, the covid pandemic, and uncertainty. Right now, we are sharing an evenly distributed sense of uncertainty about the future. It is not often we are thrust into a place where we can assess our shared fate. The lived effects of this pandemic have pushed us
Sustainability, as a word and concept, has come to be a powerful rallying idea about how we humans should live on this planet. Yet there are just as many critics of the concept as there are supporters, and we will attempt to clarify what exactly the debate entails. We will
We will discuss what we mean by ‘the economy’ and why bringing an ecological perspective to the study of ‘the economy’ is critical to addressing the global ecological crisis. This will include a brief overview of the history of the field, the tools, and concepts used by ecological economists and