Suggest real solutions

"Until you start focusing on what needs to be done rather than what is politically possible there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within this system are so impossible to find then maybe we should change the system itself." - Greta Thunberg

Our current economic, cultural and political system is largely to blame for the climate and ecological crisis. And yet too often newspapers and news broadcasters regurgitate soothing technical balms or promote individual action as the only solution to the crisis.

Our collective failure to address the climate and ecological emergency is largely a failure of the imagination. To help us imagine a better world, we have compiled a list of resources - books, articles, publications, think tanks - that explore alternative, system-level solutions to the biggest crisis humankind has ever faced. If we fail to devote column inches to ideas that dare to imagine a better world, then we will fail to address the emergency.

Resources for journalists:

• How to cover extreme heat

• How to cover heat waves

• Broadcast news scripts for connecting extreme weather to the climate crisis

• Factsheet

Books

• Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

• The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh

• Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson

• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• The Future We Chose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

• The Future Earth by Eric Holthaus

• Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution by Peter Kalmus

• Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

• Coming back to life: the updated guide to the work that reconnects by Joanna MacyDesigning Regenerative Cultures by Daniel Christian Wahl

Articles

• Can we have prosperity without growth? - New Yorker

• Degrowth - new roots for the economy - Open Democracy

• Politics without politicians - New Yorker

• The myth of America’s green growth - Foreign Policy

• Covid broke the economy. What if we don’t fix it? - Vice

• What mutual aid can do during a pandemic - New Yorker

• Outgrowing growth: why quality of life, not GDP, should be our measure of success - The Correspondent

• Degrowth: A Theory of Radical Abundance - Real World Economics

• This Index Measures Progress and Sustainability Better Than GDP - Earth Institute, Columbia University

Podcasts

• Outrage and Optimism

• Drilled

• Hot Take

• Mothers of Invention

• Team Human

• Emerge

Research papers

• What is Degrowth? From an Activist Slogan to a Social Movement

• Green New Deal papers and articles

Think tanks:

• Solutions Journalism Network - https://www.solutionsjournalism.org/ 

• Degrowth - https://www.degrowth.info/en/

• Project Drawdown - https://drawdown.org/ 

• Future Earth - https://futureearth.org/

• Bioneers - https://bioneers.org/

• Institute for Sustainable Communities - https://sustain.org/ 

Publications:

• Unlearning: From Degrowth to Decolonization

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