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Reflections on Thirty Years of Worldwatching

Gary Gardner

It’s been a fascinating experience watching the human family’s response to the emerging sustainability challenges of the past 30 years. Over a career writing on the topic, largely at the Worldwatch Institute, I marveled at the ingenuity displayed by many changemakers. I also bemoaned the blindness and stubborn resistance to change apparent in many sluggards. Here I reflect on sustainability’s ups and downs over three decades.

We are certainly a complex species with contradictory impulses and motivations.


Normalizing Outbreaks in the Anthropocene: Growth Isn’t the Cure

By James Magnus-Johnston

Death rates. Infection rates. Handwashing. Handwringing.

May I re-frame the coronavirus conversation? Although the world is currently stunned by the rapid spread of this virus across the globe, we must understand that these kinds of outbreaks are simply going to happen more often in our climate-altered world, and they highlight the fragility of our growth-or-bust industrial system. But there is a silver lining: This moment requires industrial societies to emphasize wellbeing over GDP and to witness the vulnerability of global,


Where Does Inflation Hide?

By Herman Daly

The talking heads in the media explain the recent fall in the stock market as follows: A fall in unemployment leads to a tight labor market and the prospect of wage increases; wage increase leads to threat of inflation; which leads the Fed to likely raise interest rates; which would lead to less borrowing, and to less investment in stocks, and consequently to an expected fall in stock prices.


Economics as “Unusual” in Australian Politics

Senator Christine Milne drops some seeds of hope in the barren fields of the Australian political landscape.