My life experiences tell a very different story from the “everything-has-gotten-better-and-cheaper” tale recounted to such acclaim and also disdain by Steven Pinker and like-minded defenders of US-led globalized capitalism — as I described on in another recent post. Is my perception that the world has become more expensive, dirtier and…

The last session of the US Supreme Court made some momentous decisions — decisions that will drive the country further apart and hurt many of its more vulnerable citizens. As with Covid closures, though, the result is more to intensify and speed up trends already in place than to initiate…

Globalized capitalism may be destroying the world, but it still has a great PR department. It’s astounding how many people still accept Steven Pinker’s distorted claim that everything has gotten better under capitalism — or since the enlightenment, as he prefers to put it. People live longer, fight less, know…

US and European officials talk incessantly about some “rules-based order” as if it were normal and understood by all. But whatever it is in their minds, it doesn’t exist in the unruly world we actually inhabit. This orderly world of competently if lightly regulated capitalism and liberal democratic institutions is…

By now, most of us know that the climate crisis, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have combined to leave the world short of both food and fuel. We’re painfully aware that prices for both grains and gasoline are soaring, and we may even have paid enough attention to…

As a holiday offering for your amusement, I present this personally memorialized version of the story of the over-developed world’s last 30–40 years, writ small: The City Parents of Augusta, the state capital of Maine, are considering allowing a Las Vegas developer named Patriot Holdings to convert a closed and…

I promised earlier this spring to that I would do a series of posts exploring how we might move beyond globalized fossil capital, with its compulsion for economic growth and resource exploitation. …

Factory jobs aren’t all the US lost to China over the last 40 years. Much of the pollution that goes with manufacturing also made its way across the Pacific. US rivers and air have become cleaner — thanks in large measure to closing of factories, steelworks, and mines, as the…

The economy of the future, powered by renewables, will be more distributed, smaller, cleaner and in fundamental ways fairer than the fossil-fueled global economy it is replacing. So I have believed — or at least hoped — for years. The more I realized how closely the human and industrial relationships…