Jack McGovan

@jackmcgovan.bsky.social

12977 Followers 855 Following

Writer and environmental journalist @ Sentient, The Guardian, Hakai etc www.sower.world 🇬🇧🏳️‍🌈

The framework emerged from the authors’ frustrations with a debate that seems neverending in climate circles: the idea of individual action versus system change. Where one side mostly argues for people to change their consumption behaviours, the other says that we instead need to change the systems that govern us and that promoting individual action is something fossil fuel companies have done to distract us from systemic failings. Kukowski said that both extremes are unhelpful. Focusing heavily on consumption behaviour can mean an overemphasis on low-impact actions, where that energy could perhaps be better spent elsewhere. At the same time, systems are not immutable structures outside of human control. “Systems are made of people, and we are part of those systems, and so as a part of those systems, we can also change them,” she said.
An important part of the framework, Kukowski added, is that some people have more agency than others. Someone who’s in charge of pension funds—which have pumped trillions into fossil fuel extraction—has more power to make a difference in a professional role than someone who’s on a seasonal contract at a restaurant. The seasonal worker, however, could still find other avenues through which to have an impact such as civic engagement. Each of us has our own unique set of circumstances that will determine how to best direct our efforts.
Being an investor, citizen, or role model could see you shifting investments into green energy, lobbying for climate action in your constituency, or doing some kind of climate education at your kid’s school. As a consumer, flying less, eating less meat, and driving less are the most impactful actions you can take. As a professional, however, you might be in charge of catering at your organisation, so procuring plant-based meals would have a bigger impact than just changing your own behaviour.
“Everyone's part of something—a city, a school, a university, a sports club, a business, whatever it is—and probably that place will have to transform and do things differently for a safe climate future,” said Charlotte Kukowski, postdoctoral research associate in climate change mitigation at the University of Cambridge. While that change can come from the top down, “often for these kinds of organisations it also needs to come from within, and if you don't do it, probably no one will.” Kukowski is part of a team of researchers who have come up with a framework encouraging people to seek out the spaces in their lives where they have the most agency for climate action. The so-called a-frame first asks people to reflect on the roles that they have in their lives as citizens, consumers, investors, professionals, and role models, and then figure out where they can make the biggest impact.
Väliharju suggests that, in Finland at least, there’s a sense of hope that things will return to normal after the Trump presidency. But he thinks the trust has already been broken. What is needed instead is political courage and stronger investments. “What we really need to do is try to fund the sustainability of those open source projects that we have in Europe,” he said. Plat sees things similarly. “The whole reason that we got captured by big US tech is because they looked after us so much; they took care of everything, we just handed them all our money and all of our technology,” she said. “Now is the time to look towards these alternatives and to build up skills to be able to manage them ourselves a bit better.”
Although many municipalities are moving towards open source software, not all of them are. In Berlin, the homeplace of Topio, the local government published an open source strategy this year. However, there’s scepticism about whether it will actually be properly implemented. “Especially in Berlin, there’s no open source culture in the public administration,” said Tom Jennissen, lawyer and speaker for the association Digitale Gesellschaft (Digital Society). Dikker said that civil initiatives like Topio become more important in times when politics isn’t pushing things forward. “We’re a laboratory for finding out what works and what doesn’t,” she said. “We hear from politicians that it’s important for them and that [open source] is supported by civil initiatives as well. They need a mandate from the public to legitimise their work.”
Schleswig-Holstein isn't, however, the only success story in Europe. The administration of the Spanish region of Valencia has already installed Libre Office on 120,000 of its computers, and the Portuguese town of Seixal completed their migration to the open source software in 2019. What makes Schleswig-Holstein stand out, perhaps, is its size; it’s far bigger than both of those regions put together. The perfect size for quick impact, according to Rosenthal: “We’re big enough that we can make a difference, but at the same time small enough that we know each other”.
A major success story of shifting towards open source is in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein. There, nearly 80 percent of workstations in public administration have been converted to Libre Office, an open source alternative to Microsoft Office. The state has saved 15 million euros in licensing fees, and after accounting for switching costs and other expenses, nine million euros were reinvested in the local open source ecosystem.
That process of changing how you look at animals can be very difficult. Like almost everybody else, I was brought up to consume animals, whether through meat, leather, or entertainment like zoos. It takes wilful cognitive effort to resist the values you’ve been raised with and try to chart a new path for yourself. That’s especially true as vegans are viewed negatively by an overwhelming majority of Western society; you’re fighting an uphill battle internally and externally. The point here isn’t to make veganism seem woe-is-me, but to show how there is a level of effort and commitment involved in developing a new relationship with other species. That process of internal reflection has made me a much more intellectually humble person. It’s only because I’ve unpicked this idea of human dominance over animals, something that had been ingrained in me since early childhood, that I’m now willing to challenge all of my beliefs. If I could have been wrong about something so fundamental as our relationship to other species on this planet, what else could I possibly be wrong about?
A screenshot of the linked article. The subtitle reads: Virus origin. The text reads: The highly pathogenic H5N1 strain emerged in commercial geese in Asia in around 1996, and spread in poultry throughout Europe and Africa in the early 2000s.
While this world may seem fantastical in its capacity for cruelty, it very much mirrors the horrors of our own present. We find that the Tretoans have appropriated a tradition from a society they almost eradicated; they carry out executions on gibbets made from the bones of victims of the empire. This exploitation of colonised bodies at the highest and most rarified levels of the imperial core is shocking and distressing and entirely plausible in our own reality. Would the story of dons at one of the most prestigious universities in the world drinking out of the skull of an enslaved woman at dinner parties strain your disbelief?
Vervoort, whose research sits at the nexus between climate and gaming, wishes that progressive movements would pay more attention to games as a space for change. He pointed out that video games are the largest form of media globally, eclipsing music and film. “Games are a cultural force. They reinforce identities and values, and reproduce them. They galvanise communities and networks,” he said. “They're a vector for social change in that sense.” With progressives not really paying attention to games, it leaves the space open to takeover from the far-right. The White House shared a video splicing bombings of Iran together with video game footage, and one of the world’s largest video game streamers, Asmongold, excused the fact that a school full of kids in Iran got bombed. “There's not enough progressives doing stuff in the game space, and especially in the social media ecosystems around games,” he said.
Text from the article: A tangible demonstration of this can be found in cars, said Schütze. Cars are a mode of transport that allows a person to move between different points without having direct contact with other humans. A society that builds that kind of infrastructure has a certain set of values attached to it, like, for example, prioritising individual autonomy over all else. The more people use cars, the more those values become ingrained in society. On the flipside, a society that builds out a robust public transport system would have different values. That society would value collectivism and community spirit more, as transport would only be possible with direct contact with other humans—shared spaces become more important than individual autonomy. To that end, while electric cars might be more sustainable than fossil-fuel vehicles in terms of emissions, they still promote values that uphold the system that brought the climate crisis in the first place.
That’s along the lines of how Bennett views things as well—if you don’t support people to immerse themselves in the creativity industries, the well of talented people will run dry. “Our natural resource is the Irish psyche, really,” she said. “We've always punched above our weight in terms of writers, film, and you know more increasingly we're showing our strengths as visual artists.”
McDermott used the money from the BIA to take more risks with her writing by experimenting with novels, flash fiction, and non-fiction. Still, she highlighted that she was in the privileged position to do so, as her husband has a stable income. One critique she had of the scheme was that disabled people who took the money would lose their disability benefits. “There is a push for diverse voices in the arts, but the financial support needed to encourage that diversity has been lacking,” she said.
A report on the scheme was published in September, with results showing that for every euro of public money invested in the scheme, there was a 1.39 euro benefit to the economy. Unsurprisingly, a modicum of financial security led to lower feelings of anxiety or depression for the participants by 13 and 11 percentage points respectively. Whether correlation or causation, the artists were more likely to complete new works and participate in exhibitions, performances, or other audience-facing activities by 10 percentage points.
The CanTeams project hosts community dining experiences at schools across England. So far, the project has served over 3000 people at over 50 events. “We're trying to turn schools into community hubs, and using activities and nutritious food to do that,” said Jonathan Harper, CEO of Future Foundations, the organisation behind CanTeams. “If you have a young person performing, singing, or doing something… [that] can help catalyse communities coming in.” Although the project primarily focuses on school children and their immediate families, there have been events involving pensioners or those in care homes. Harper told the story of one old lady who said she was scared of young people and therefore didn’t take the bus in the afternoons, who, after sitting side by side with teenagers and breaking bread with them, felt safe. In the future, he wants to create events where the wider community can come in to eat after the children leave.
But if public diners are so great, why did they disappear in the first place? Bryce Evans, a professor of modern world history at Liverpool Hope University who has written a book on the history of British Restaurants, told Sower in an email there were three main reasons they were shut down: the political will to keep them disappeared after the war ended; private retail trade rallied hard against state-subsidised dining and urged a return to the free market; and the central government cut funding.
More broadly, public diners could be a guiding light for a better food system. In a piece for The Conversation published late last year, Benjamin Selwyn, professor of international relations and international development at the University of Sussex, wrote: “subsidised community restaurants could serve seasonal dishes made with locally grown plant-based food, produced on farms that encourage wildlife through widespread tree cultivation, the use of cover-crops, and improvements to soil health.” Democratic input would also be important to make public diners work. Different demographics have cultural practices that should not only be reflected in what food is served, but also how it’s served. In places with large Muslim communities, for example, public diners should be accessible after sunset during Ramadan. Public diners could also act as a place of cultural exchange, where those from different backgrounds meet and explore cuisines from all over the world.
Public diners already have a history in the UK, where so-called British Restaurants offered places to eat during the wartime period of the 20th century. At their peak, there were 2000 situated across the UK, all of which were subsidised by the government. For comparison, there are around 1450 McDonalds in the country today. “Before we had a national health service, we had a national restaurant service,” said Chworow. An exhibition by Nourish Scotland demonstrating the history of British Restaurants, and how similar concepts exist in countries like Poland, Turkey, Mexico, and Singapore, is currently travelling around Scotland to raise public awareness. “We somehow seem to think, ‘Oh, no, the state couldn't do that’, and when you say, ‘No, actually, it has done that—and within our living memory’, it just allows people to go, ‘Oh, maybe we could do this again’,” said Chworow.
The idea of people coming together to eat might seem like a wonderful idea on the surface, but it’s also a response to something more sinister. One in ten people in the EU are unable to afford a proper meal every second day, and a third of children in the UK live in homes where there is not enough access to healthy and nutritious food. As people can’t afford basic nourishment, restaurants, too, are struggling with people no longer able to afford the experience of eating out. While charity or pay-what-you-can models offer a way for the needy to eat, they’re a symptom of a failure in social policy. That’s why the food charity Nourish Scotland are pushing for the reintroduction of public diners to Scotland: diners subsidised by the state to provide affordable, nutritious, and filling meals that are accessible to everyone regardless of their financial status.
Goodall spent 300 days a year travelling to do advocacy work even up until her death, and flying so much undoubtedly made her a human being with one of the largest carbon footprints. However, she encouraged people to go vegan on environmental grounds, so she clearly believed that our consumption choices had an impact on the world. The only conclusion to be drawn from her excessive flying is that she believed her interventions were worth the carbon cost, that her presence at environmental conferences would help save the world from destruction. That sort of thinking is replicated elsewhere. Climate scientists were found to fly more often for work than other researchers, presumably because they believe their expertise—their individual pearls of wisdom—are necessary to stop global temperatures rising. People who take to the skies more often are more likely to build larger networks that get them more recognition for their work, in turn providing them with more opportunities to be involved at conferences and other international events.
The economic system we live under has nurtured these Great Man narratives because it’s precisely what keeps it propped up. Our system teaches us that those who work hard will rise to the top on the basis of their merit and contribution to the world. When we see people like Jane Goodall, a small part of us believes that we too can achieve as much as she has and rise to exalted status if we put our mind to it. Only by dangling that carrot before us does the neoliberal wheel keep turning. Yet we don’t live in a meritocracy. In 2017, Kenyan conservationist Dr Mordecai Ogada published the book The Big Conservation Lie, which criticised “white saviours” like Goodall for contributing to the narrative that it is only through Western expertise that charismatic African species can be conserved and saved. Have any African conservationists received a damehood or regular well-paid speaking opportunities across the world for their work?
In one experiment, participants would roll dice, report the number that turned up either honestly or dishonestly, and then they would get paid the same amount, with bigger numbers meaning a higher payout. Some participants were given the option of telling the number to an AI model — again, either honestly or dishonestly — which would then report the dice outcome to researchers. The results were striking. About 95 percent of participants were honest when AI wasn’t involved — but that figure dropped to a sleazy 75 percent when people used the AI model to report dice numbers. And participants’ ethics worsened even further when they were given the opportunity to manipulate an AI model with different data sets that either reported the dice numbers accurately every time, some of the time, or that would give out the maximum number of the dice anytime it was rolled. In another scenario, participants could set the parameters of the AI model by either maximizing its accuracy or the amount of profit it could make from the dice rolls; over 84 percent cheated — as in they overwhelmingly chose maximum profit over accuracy for reporting the dice numbers.
Despite now having to inhale larger volumes of exhaust fumes on a daily basis, I didn't deserve to vote in the local election because of one egregious crime: my lack of German citizenship. While 449,990 people voted for the party who won the last local election, there are 829,900 foreign residents in Berlin—none of whom could vote. That means almost twice as many people couldn't vote than there are people who voted for the winning party. Similar systems exist around the world. In the USA, non-citizens, including permanent legal residents, aren’t allowed to vote in federal, state, or most local elections. England allows Irish, Commonwealth, and EU citizens, under certain conditions, to vote in local elections, though only the former two have a say in general elections. Citizens of the European Union are largely allowed to vote in local elections across the bloc, though not in all cases, such as the German city states of Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg.
Dear Joe Morris, My name is Jack McGovan, and I'm a voter in your constituency. I'm writing to ask that you join the chorus of MPs calling for the government to quit X following Elon Musk's recent comments. Not only did he openly call for a "change of government," he very specifically called on far-right thugs to use violence to do that. Musk and his rhetoric are a danger to the UK and democracy, and staying on his platform only garners him more support, giving him a larger platform from which to spout his dangerous views. I feel it's imperative that you act now to address this issue before it's too late. Yours sincerely, Jack McGovan
A graph showing how the use of nature words (green line) has declined since 1800 versus how human interacts with nature have also declined (dotted purple line). The results match quite closely. The following text describes the graph: Nature is disappearing from our language and our lives Since 1800, there's been a sharp decline in nature-related words in English language books. It closesy matches a simulation of nature-human interactions.
Sian Cowman, a self-employed researcher whose PhD focused on climate migration and media discourse around it, said that while she very much welcomes eco-populist policies, she’s sceptical of a party’s ability to fulfil its vision under our current political and economic system. “My concern with all of these things… is that there's just a history of parties taking power and finding it very difficult to actually move forward,” she said. Rather than focusing on a top-down approach where a political party takes power at a state level, Cowman believes we’d be better off organising locally. Examples she gave include building solutions like community gardens, energy projects, or resisting fossil fuel infrastructure.
In order to tackle the far right, she suggested building a positive counter-narrative about the kind of society we actually want to build and doing so without shame or hesitation—eco-populism, essentially. “It's certainly not an easy task, because there's a lot of resistance to it from powerful voices,” she said. That's why she’s not convinced that branding a left-wing movement as populist is helpful in the long term. She said that it creates the possibility for the mainstream to create a false equivalency between the left and the right and in the process claim that populists are a danger to society. Aurelien Mondon, a professor of politics at the University of Bath who also studies the far right, agrees with Brown, as the word populism has been polluted by decades of misuse by anti-populists and moral panics around populism. “It was quite interesting to see Polanski trying to call himself a populist,” he said. “It seems to have worked fairly well so far, but we'll have to see what happens when he becomes a real threat [if and when he becomes leader].”
During the 2024 election in the UK, Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform party, was the third most covered politician despite neither him nor his party ever having won a seat at the time. “There's like this kind of fascination with the far right [in mainstream media] and that amplifies their visibility and message,” said Katy Brown, a research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the mainstreaming of far-right narratives. Brown highlighted that in the future she would like to work with media organisations and journalists to come up with guidelines for reporting on the far right. One key aspect she mentioned is that journalists shouldn’t just focus on how bad the far right are, but put their actions into the broader context by exposing how far-right talking points have been normalised by mainstream political parties.
I do think, however, that offering a positive vision of the future is equally as important as having an opponent to rally against. Let’s take down billionaires not only because they’re sociopathic ghouls, but because their wealth belongs to us anyway, as it is upon our collective labour that their fortunes are built. With our reclaimed wealth, we could retrofit people’s homes, create secure jobs in the expansion of publicly-owned renewables, and invest in free education so people can retrain at any age into jobs fit for the future—or study something purely out of interest or obsession. Productivity gains have been unprecedented in recent decades due to automation, and those gains should be redistributed as a four-day week for everybody instead of lining shareholder pockets. An extra day of freedom would mean spending more time with our loved ones and give us more chances to engage with our communities, fostering a collective spirit in our local areas. With people more in tune with the needs of their neighbours, we could restore local economies and shift towards public transport, leaving children free to explore without fear of being flattened by an SUV.
Climate policies don't necessarily have to be communicated as such in order to be effective either, and there are a number of examples demonstrating so in the US. A fare-free bus pilot in New York City saw 11% of riders choosing the bus over their usual car or taxi ride, leading to a reduction in emissions. Zohran Mamdani, who won the primary to become the Democratic mayoral candidate for NYC in June, has promised to expand fare-free bus rides across the entire city on affordability grounds as part of his platform. In July 2022, the Whole-Homes Repair Program was created as part of Pennsylvania’s state budget. Introduced by state senator Nikil Saval, the programme provides grants for low- and moderate-income homeowners to undertake critical home repairs, job training for careers in home retrofitting with cash stipends for trainees, and support staff to help eligible applicants access the correct programmes. Saval highlighted one instance of a single mother with two children who applied for funding through the programme due to a lack of heating in her home. She had a heat pump installed and repairs done to her kitchen floor and roof, soon to be equipped with a solar array. “There are lots and lots of stories like this—people who are able to stay in their homes who otherwise might have lost them,” said Saval.
Americans listed the affordability of healthcare, inflation, and the number of people living in poverty noticeably higher than immigration on a poll of national concerns earlier this year. European youths said they were most concerned about rising prices and the cost of living, and when asked about issues affecting them personally, people from the UK also said they were most concerned about the rising cost of living. Clearly there’s a gap in the rhetorical market for policies that make people’s lives easier.
“Green economic populism is effectively the notion that economic policy should be used for the benefit of working people, and it should be done in a way that addresses the climate and broader ecological crisis that we face simultaneously,” said Patrick Bigger, research director at progressive think tank the Climate and Community Institute, USA. Interventions that fall under green economic populism include state investments in renewable energy production or infrastructure that would lower people’s bills, creating jobs in the production of batteries for electric vehicles or public transport, and investments in the kinds of work that are low carbon and benefit society, like care work, said Bigger.
When individuals sold their Teslas or refused to buy them as part of the Tesla Takedown campaign, sales for the company plummeted to their lowest level in three years and share values dropped by a quarter—despite expectations that 2025 will be a record-breaking year for electric vehicle sales. The boycott and the associated campaign played a pivotal role in damaging the company. Historically, boycotts have had significant success in achieving political goals. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and the 1963 boycott of Birmingham businesses in the US inflicted major costs on business owners, thereby forcing them to support racial integration. The anti-apartheid movement that led to the establishment of the Republic of South Africa began as a consumer boycott.
Answers could also lie beyond the confines of Western society. In writing his book Radical Mindfulness: Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital, political ecologist Rowe collected insights from, among numerous other traditions, Indigenous thinkers. He explained how Indigenous cultures recognised the danger of existential fear and resentment and so developed strategies to deal with that. The Arikara, for example, would have somebody dress up as death, so the tribe could then talk about meeting death with one another. Although he said we should be careful not to appropriate other cultures, he believes we can learn a lot from Indigenous people and the gratitude they feel towards the natural world. Developing our own cultures around death is therefore a necessary part of soothing our collective anxiety. “Just because we die doesn’t mean we’re flawed,” he said.
There are a number of initiatives that are trying to encourage people to talk more about death. Death Over Dinner is a concept that originated in 2013 encouraging people to have dinner with their loved ones to speak about their wishes around death. Since 2011, people have been attending Death Cafes to speak about mortality and death in a relaxed social environment—according to the website, there have been 20,950 Death Cafes in 93 countries across the world.
Jonathan Lewis-Jong, a self-employed experimental psychologist connected to the Universities of Oxford and Coventry who has studied death anxiety, is a little more sceptical of using death anxiety as an explanation for some of the issues we see in the world. “There have been several failures to replicate some of these experiments in social psychology,” he said, referring to the experiments on how death anxiety influences people’s behaviour. Green burials, he said, mean going against the grain and therefore require more deliberation. “I think that's the thing that helps with making you feel a bit more comfortable with your mortality, rather than the specificities and particularities of green burials,” he said. He added that green burials would likely only help those who actually believe in the idea of them.
Loved ones are also invited to take a more active role in the natural burial process at Prairie Creek Conversation Cemetery by, for example, helping to dig the grave. It used to be common for families to prepare the dead themselves at home until the turn of the 20th century, when embalming became popular following the American Civil War. Returning families to the deathcare process can help with grief and death anxiety, said Heather Grove, executive director at Prairie Creek. Being buried at Prairie Creek also has a collectivist spin to it. Due to the laws of the U.S., it's illegal to develop on land which has been used as a burial site, said Grove, meaning those laid to rest there are protecting the land and the biodiversity on it in perpetuity. In contrast, Western cemeteries remove biodiversity to inscribe an individual's achievements on headstones. Focusing on the collective over the individual is the antithesis of authoritarianism.
Green burials might, however, have the power to go further and cleanse our minds of death anxiety. “[Green burials] are based on embracing a view of the world that I think does foster death acceptance much more so than the dominant Judeo-Christian tradition,” said Sheldon Solomon, professor of psychology at Skidmore College, New York. Solomon, who was involved in much of the research underpinning the links between authoritarianism and death anxiety, said green burials encourage us to think about our place in the universe, help us to build a stronger connection to the natural world, and enrich our appreciation of our limited lifespans. “Accepting the reality of the human condition brings the best out in us and enhances our appreciation of life in general,” he said.
“We compensate for the smallness that we can feel in the face of finitude by imposing ourselves on each other and the more-than-human world as a way of gaining hits of the power and control that the natural world seems to deny us,” said Rowe. He added that many people have made similar arguments before him, including James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, and Chögyam Trungpa. The people at the top of these supremacist structures do seem obsessed with ideas embedded in a fear of death. Elon Musk desperately wants to be remembered for getting us to Mars, a rock devoid of joy much like his existence; Bryan Johnson takes a strict regimen of supplements to try extend his life, even though he looks like his soul has already left his body; and being trans is okay in Silicon Valley, as long as you’re transhumanist—shedding our corporeal forms and uploading our consciousness to computers—and not transgender.
The way our perception of the world changes when confronted with death has potential widespread ramifications. One study found a “dramatic increase” in support for Bush and the Iraq War, among both liberals and conservatives, when participants were reminded of their mortality. A similar experiment over a decade later found those asked to think about their death were more likely to vote for Donald Trump. Although it’s the reverse for me—the thought of voting for Donald Trump makes eternal oblivion seem more appealing—the implication is that a fear of death is affecting our politics at a mass scale. The underlying theory is that people are inclined to seek out charismatic leaders, rather than those championing fact and reason, when existential anxieties are at a high. What, then, are the consequences of living in a society where people are struggling to make enough money to afford shelter, food, or healthcare, where the frequency of severe wildfires and disastrous floods are increasing, and where the threat of another war hangs around the corner?
A drop down menu of age ranges. At the top is the word "Select", followed by the options of "Under 18 yrs", "18 - 25 yrs", "26 - 60 yrs" and "60+ yrs".
I think we can all agree that creative or care work is more fulfilling than fixing the mistakes of an algorithm, yet it is specifically the former roles that are harder to earn a reasonable living from. By cutting down the total hours we work as a society, we could instead fairly distribute the meaningful, necessary work amongst ourselves. Working less is also a popular policy idea: around 67 percent of workers said they'd sacrifice some of their salary for a four-day week. Campaigning on a platform where workers wouldn't have to lose income seems like an issue we could all coalesce around, restoring a sense of class consciousness not felt for decades. That could, in turn, be used to deal with other labour issues like "AI" or falling living standards. Yes, it’s important that we stop emitting carbon. But with so many people burnt out and unfulfilled, there's a chance here to create a broader narrative of how we can all work less, take our free time back from the ruling classes, and in the process reduce emissions—make everybody happy, oligarchs aside.
Adrian Cruden, head of people at FOE, doesn’t work on Mondays and uses the time to go walking when it’s quieter, to visit friends, and to work on his writing. The four-day week at FOE has meant no loss of pay with other positives, too. “It hasn't led to any reduction in output,” said Cruden. “We've seen a bit of a decline in sickness absence, especially around mental health and stress.” A report focused on the outcomes of a four-day week pilot in the UK found that the vast majority of participating organisations were satisfied that business performance and productivity were maintained. When Microsoft implemented a four-day week in Japan, productivity even increased by 40 percent.
Humans are social creatures. Many of the activities we enjoy the most are those rooted in communities outside of the workplace, such as playing with children, performing religious acts, or roasting our closest friends in jest. We spend so much time on the clock, however, that it becomes impossible to engage with everybody we’d like to in a meaningful way. Not only do our personal relationships suffer, the social fabric itself seems to be falling apart. Over two-thirds of people said they would spend more time with friends and family if they worked a four-day week. Over half said they’d spend more time home cooking, and a quarter said they’d do local volunteering. Research suggests that when people have more time off, they tend to spend it doing “soft” activities like reading, playing, or exercising, wink wink.
The campaign in the UK also reached a landmark earlier this year when the 200th company signed up for a permanent four-day week with no loss of pay. Given the benefits to people and planet, it seemed like a no-brainer that climate organisations, who so often espouse the need for system change and a new way of living, would make up a decent chunk of those signed up to the campaign. Of the 200 companies, however, only seven had some relevance to environmental issues. Many heavyweights in the field, like Greenpeace, WWF and Client Earth, were notably absent. In a four-day week pilot in Germany, only one of the 45 businesses who took part—a solar panel installation company—had any kind of climate connection.
A graph with different responses to the question "How would you rate, in terms of importance, the following measures aimed at preserving the environment and the planet?". The responses are the people who selected "very important." Reducing waste and increasing recycling - 57% Stopping deforestation - 54% Protecting endangered animal species - 52% Building energy efficient buildings – 47% Banning the use of polluting substances in industry/agriculture – 46% Replacing fossil fuels with renewable enery – 45% Increasing consumption of local products – 33% Developing natural spaces with limited human activity – 32% Reducing people's energy consumption – 32% Decreasing the amount of energy we use to heat or cool our homes – 32% Favouring the use of public transport over cars – 25% Radically changing out agricultural model – 24% Reducing travel by planes – 23% Increasing the price of products that do not respect environmental criteria – 23% Banning fossil fuel vehicles – 22% Reducing meat consumption – 18% Reducing international trade – 17%
An excerpt from the article that says: For too long, the narrative around languages has been that the dominant language should replace supposedly less “desirable” ones, rather than foster their coexistence. The belief that bilingual children will be confused or struggle with learning multiple languages at once is a misconception that has been widely debunked by research. In fact, studies consistently show the numerous cognitive benefits of multilingualism. So if the world’s thousands of “smaller” languages are to survive, a different approach is urgently needed — one that moves away from monolingualism as the norm, and toward a recognition that what makes a language “useful” is not necessarily determined by its number of speakers.
A poster for a reading group in Berlin. There's a purple background with strips of white that resemble cut out bits of paper with text on. The text reads: "Textual Deviance / 11th Feb. 19:30 in Bechereck, Okerstraße 35, 12049, Berlin / discussing / The Importance of Solidarity in Queer Survival / reading / D.I.Y by John Wiswell / ALL QUEERS WELCOME!"
Analyses based on a study area that excludes the state’s five major cities and western counties that have no presence of this industry show that the proportion of POC living within 3 miles of an industrial hog operation is 1.52 times higher than the proportion of non-Hispanic Whites. The proportions of Blacks, Hispanics and American Indians living within 3 miles of an industrial hog operation are 1.54, 1.39 and 2.18 times higher, respectively, than the proportion of non-Hispanic Whites (p<0.0001).
A screenshot of the linked article. The subtitle reads: Virus origin. The text reads: The highly pathogenic H5N1 strain emerged in commercial geese in Asia in around 1996, and spread in poultry throughout Europe and Africa in the early 2000s.
A graphic for an event with a purple and black background. There are strips of white resembling cut out pieces of paper with black text on. The text says the following: "Textual Deviance / 17th Oct. / 19:30 / in R100 / Gelände der "Neue Zukunft" Alt-Stralau 68, 10245, Berlin / discussing Dick Pig by Ian Muneshwar / ALL QUEERS WELCOME!"
A screenshot of text from the study mentioned in the article. There are a number of different statements with a percentage of responses highlighted. A coloured code defines a response from "strongly disagree" through to "strongly agree".
Screenshot of text from the article: German climate movement Letzte Generation, part of the international A22 network that includes Just Stop Oil, sabotaged a number of fuel pipelines across Germany this spring – more than 30 times in total, the group claims. “We asked ourselves, what can we do to really put pressure on the government to give us a reaction towards our demands?” says Lars Werner, who was involved in the action. “We did it publicly – it wasn't an action that we wanted to hide from.” But despite their enormous logistical efforts, the media coverage was underwhelming. The corporations targeted didn’t react publicly, either. “The government could ignore what we were doing because there wasn’t much attention,” says Werner. Following the action, the group reverted to its old tactics of blocking roads.
In response to Sentient’s request for comment, a spokesperson for the European Commission pointed to the language of the proposed policy, which discusses how wolf populations have increased enough to justify a change in protected status from ‘strictly protected’ to ‘protected.’ Other arguments for a change in policy include economic and emotional consequences for livestock farmers. Still, the bottom line: there is no specific evidence in the document explaining why the Commission chose hunting over other measures for reducing wolf-livestock conflict. Even research requested by the Commission does not point to hunting as an effective policy. An in-depth analysis on wolves in the EU was carried out on behalf of the Commission and published in December 2023. The authors found “non-targeted culling (i.e., hunting) does not seem to reduce wolf depredations on livestock unless it is carried out with such intensity that it effectively reduces the density of wolves over large areas.”
A screenshot of text from the article saying: Others have criticized the “biomedical-industrial complex” for resisting change and upholding a culture of testing on animals. Jim Keen, an agricultural veterinarian and professor turned whistleblower who exposed the mistreatment of livestock in a USDA research facility, writes: “The biomedical industrial complex is an impenetrable, taxpayer-money-driven ecosystem, where the stated biomedical and public health missions are sometimes subservient to more selfserving ones.” He adds: “This does not impugn or discredit most animal researchers, who usually have good, if misguided, intentions.”
A screenshot of text from the article saying: Of the $42 billion of funding the NIH awarded in 2020, 47% went to projects based on animal testing. But it should be pointed out that there are many laws, regulations, and policies that protect animals used in federally funded research. According to the National Institutes of Health, these protections include considering nonanimal alternatives to meet the scientific objectives and using the fewest subjects needed for thorough and repeatable results. They also outline standards that reflect a commitment to animal care.
A news article translated into English from German via Google Translate. The headline is visible and says: Berlin is removing 30km/h zones in front of schools, daycare centres and retirement homes. There's also a feature image which is a 30km/h sign.
A screenshot of text saying the following: Some meat promoters make health claims about beef and red meat. "It's difficult to heal and repair your body without animal protein, especially red meat," says Eric Berg, a chiropractor, who notes on his website that he is not a medical doctor and is not providing medical diagnosis or treatment.