B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

As wars escalate, ecological systems collapse, and inequality deepens, traditional, nation-centered ideas of security and peace are no longer sufficient. “Planetary peace” links peace with ecological balance, regenerative economics, social justice, and planetary cooperation in this new human era.

Gas turbine manufacturers are confident they will win the battle over whether Europe’s AI boom will be powered by fossil fuels.

Nate invites listeners to view the constant churn of headlines through a wider-boundary lens. He begins with the misleading framing of recent oil production statistics by the United States, which blurs distinctions between crude oil and broader petroleum products.

A new volume in the r3.0 “Seeds Series” brings together thinkers, activists and systems scholars exploring how societies might move through ecological and institutional breakdown toward more regenerative, place-based and cooperative forms of life.

Among a flurry of posts on social media last weekend, US president Donald Trump declared “good riddance” to a specific emissions scenario used in global climate projections.

Chris Smaje visits Crazy Town for some farmer-to-farmer straight talk. We cover Viking raids to agrarian populism, from societal collapse to the practicalities of making your way in a failed state. And they can’t get away from the shop talk of gardens, livestock, and home economics.

Conceptualizing Security in a Time of Deep Civilizational Crisis Date and time * Date: June 4th, 2026 * Time: 1pm GMT * Registration Link: Here * Speakers: Manuel Rozental (Colombia), Dipa Sinha (India) and (TBC) * Moderation: Introduction This is the first of a series of webinars that will open the series with a conceptual discussion on security in a time of deep civilizational crisis. It will examine how security has traditionally been framed through the international order, the n…

In this installment of an ongoing series, Tom and Dave Murphy explore what “sustainable” truly means and whether any disruption to natural ecosystems or energy flows by humanity is inherently unsustainable.

History offers a grim account of how structural change occurs. But concealed within that bleakness is a window of possibility that opens just when things fall apart.

Extreme heat is already a defining climate and health threat in southern Africa, yet public debate still treats it as ordinary bad weather. A new study shows that, as climate change drives more extreme events, governments and institutions can adopt practical steps to make communities more climate‑resilient.

05-22 * 13:00 - RD-TG meeting (Bea)

05-20 * 13:00 - Toolkit for Weaving (Bea)

Trees as lived memories serve us citizens and residents, a culinary or recreational experience of engaging with them at regular intervals in our lives. A mango or jackfruit tree may bring back past relationships with our forefathers, and their ritualistic pickling processes or preservation through frying of chips. A banyan or peepal tree of the […]

Computer models that use artificial intelligence (AI) cannot forecast record-breaking weather as well as traditional climate models, according to a new study.

Economic growth does not increase our well-being. It drives environmental damage and will inevitably slow as we hit resource limits. Yet many countries, companies, and individuals remain fiercely attached to growth. This article uses systemic analysis and System Dynamics diagrams to explore why we keep pursuing more, despite what we know.

America’s broken approaches to roadway safety and criminal justice are profoundly intertwined, a provocative new report argues — and until reformers in both fields reckon with how deeply their battles are connected, neither will notch any real progress.

Researchers at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law closely examined how mass car dependency amplifies harm in the criminal legal system, like rampant traffic stops that disproportionately turn deadly for people of color or traffic fines that trap low-income earners in “inescapable, inequitable cycles of indebtedness, as ticketing practices stress profits over safety.”

The report encourages Vision Zero advocates to consider how an over-emphasis on enforcement-based safety strategies is hobbling the cause, by creating incentives for ineffective policing that distract and siphon resources from proven solutions, like increasing mobility alternatives, that are often forgotten or ignored.

“Police reform advocates and road safety advocates should be working together, just as departments of transportation and police departments should be working together,” said Scarlett Neath, senior adviser at the Policing Project and an author of the report. “Those two agencies and those two groups of advocates need to be swimming in the same direction.”

Recommended How Some Traffic Fines and Fees Can Make Our Roads More Dangerous Kea Wilson July 31, 2023

The report authors say that, in many ways, America’s car-dependent transportation system and police-focused approach to safety evolved in tandem. They argue that “corporate interests, public investment decisions, and racial discrimination” collectively eroded public transit networks in favor of installing officers on roadsides across the nation.

Neath doesn’t deny that there should be consequences for deadly driving, but says the particulars of how our communities impose those punishments has devastated many communities — without significantly reducing the likelihood of future crashes fast enough. Indeed, the United States has twice the rate of fatal car crash deaths of other high-income countries, and more than triple the rate of police killings.

“We’re not saying there’s no deterrence effect [from policing],” she added. “But the deterrence it might cause often also comes with significant costs — and there other solutions that may have bigger deterrent effects without those costs.”

Recommended Study: Police Killings of Civilians Undercounted By More Than Half Kea Wilson October 7, 2021

One of the steepest costs of over-emphasizing policing in traffic safety, Neath says, is simply diverting attention and resources away from infrastructure and vehicle technology that make it difficult or impossible for motorists to drive in deadly ways— rather than reacting to bad behavior after the fact.

The design-focused solutions we do have, meanwhile, are inequitably distributed. A 2023 study found that roughly “60 percent of Black children live in neighborhoods that lack amenities associated with healthy development, including sidewalks or walking paths.” Black communities remain significantly more policed than white neighborhoods with similar homicide rates and income levels.

“If a lot of enforcement is happening at the same intersection that should be a sign that there are things we should do to stop enforcement from happening through structural, preventative measures,” she added. “If a ton of folks are blazing through a road and police aren’t able to control that behavior, the stop lights have to be retimed, the speed limit has to be lowered, and maybe, the road needs to be redesigned.” 

Recommended A Plan to Eliminate Pretextual Police Stops, While Still Increasing Traffic Safety Cameron Bolton November 21, 2023

Worse, Neath says many roadside stops aren’t motivated by traffic safety at all.

The report’s authors note that “pretextual” stops exploded in the 1970s, when War on Drugs-era politicians encouraged police departments to profile suspects based on their race and gender, and use broken tail lights, expired tags, and any other available pretext to stop and search their cars.

Today, explicit and implicit “stop quotas” still provide perverse incentives for cops to accelerate their rate of pretextual stops to write lots of tickets, rather than wait around to catch the most flagrantly dangerous drivers — especially as many municipalities have come to rely on fines and fees to pay for basic services.

“When people hear about traffic stops, there’s an assumption that they’re made for safety-related reasons,” Neath added. “But we know from data in jurisdictions across the country that it’s really a mixed bag. … Police resources are finite, and we’ve seen that when departments prioritize safety stops, they have better crash prevention outcomes — without negative outcomes for the kind of crime-fighting [efforts] that pretext stops are theoretically are used for, because [pretextual stops] are so infrequently discovering evidence of crimes.” 

Recommended Survey: Americans Still Want Police To Cut Traffic Stops That Don’t Make Anyone Safer Kea Wilson March 26, 2025

To truly make American streets safe, Neath says it won’t be enough just to end policies that incentivize or require ineffective policing in the transportation realm or to redesign streets to put safety first. It will require thinking about how those two goals interact — and looking to new models to enhance them both.

Across the report and a companion study written in partnership with the Vision Zero Network, the Policing Project outlined dozens of strategies that communities can consider, including under-discussed ones, like piloting civilian enforcement and equipment repair vouchers to remove a common pretext for police and motorist interaction.

Most of all, though, Neath says it’s time for advocates to think more holistically about what safety is — and how deeply intertwined the Vision Zero and police reform movements have always been.

“Preventable deaths and injuries in car crashes, unacceptable violent outcomes from the most common form of police community member contact — these are both public health crises,” she added. “It’s an opportune time to learn from the progress we’ve made on both fronts, and to double down on that progress.”

• Are conservatives coming around to walkability? The American Enterprise Institute thinks they should. And the Reason Foundation is in favor of transit-oriented development.
• Much of AEI’s argument has to do with how being able to roam around the neighborhood improves their mental health and takes pressure off parents to drive their kids everywhere. But not everyone on the right accepts Tim Carney’s thesis (Longer Forms). Carney’s critics on the right should talk to school crossing guards before claiming that car-centric streets don’t influence where kids can walk (The Guardian).
• In related news, Brandon Donnelly wrote about how more young families that can afford to do so are staying in cities rather than moving to the suburbs. And Angie Schmitt interviewed Lenore Skenazy, the author of “Free Range Kids.” (Love of Place)
• Uber is offering transit agencies $50,000 grants to test on-demand transit service. (Cities Today)
• CalTrans is looking into “bullet buses” that would travel 140 miles per hour on dedicated freeway lanes between Los Angeles and San Francisco. (Hoodline)
• L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez returned to one of his favorite topics: how screwed up the city’s sidewalk repair program is.
• Debris from one of Amtrak’s new Acela cars is the likely cause of a recent fire at Penn Station. (New York Daily News)
• Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller criticized the city council for cutting $5 million from pedestrian safety. (KOB 4)
• Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell defended himself against protesters who say the city is diverting funds for Vision Zero to road repaving. (News Channel 5)
• Kansas City will add east-west bus routes and step up frequency during the World Cup. (Star)
• Bike buses are catching on in Baltimore. (The Banner)
• Amtrak’s sleeper cars are getting upgraded (Business Insider).

Reflexiones sobre la seguridad en una época de profunda crisis civilizatoria Fecha y horario * Fecha: 4 de junio, 2026 * Horario: 1pm GMT * Enlace de Registro: Aquí * Participantes: Manuel Rozental (Colombia), Deepa Sinha (India) and (TBC) * Moderación

Wine is one of the most delicious agricultural products worldwide, but it leaves behind a less delectable trail: millions of tons of wasted skins, seeds, and flesh. Now a team of researchers has landed on a circular economy solution for these mounds of mush. 

They say it can be used as a replacement antibiotic on chicken farms, working almost as well as the real thing.  

In the United States where the study was based, broiler farms—those that raise chickens for meat—have been trying to wean their livestock off antibiotics, over growing fears about drug resistance and environmental damage. But there’s a catch: these drugs, known as ‘antibiotic growth promoters’ serve a useful purpose because they help fight harmful gut bacteria that cause inflamed guts, make chickens sick, and reduce their growth levels. Farmers have been crying out for a solution—and this is where wine waste comes in.

Building on previous work revealing the possible bacteria-fighting potential of wine waste (known as ‘pomace’), the researchers decided to test it out in a series of experiments on 126 chickens, which they split into different treatment groups. Some were fed a diet containing 30% rice bran which is a known gut-inflamer. Others received that diet, but with the addition of a conventional antibiotic called zinc-bacitracin. Another group were fed the bran diet supplemented with a tiny percentage of grape pomace, which was either plain or fermented. 

Even at a tiny dose making up just 0.5% of the chickens’ diet, the researchers found that the addition of grape pomace brought about a remarkable change in the birds. Compared to those animals that received the diet without any added treatment, their body weight gains increased by 79%, and their average body weight increased by almost 20%, both helpful indicators of improved gut health. 

The fermented grape waste produced the most promising results. The researchers think this may be because fermentation changes the grapes’ chemical composition in a way that appeals to beneficial gut microbes that can boost the chickens’ digestive health. Strikingly also, the grape waste-treated birds showed beneficial physiological changes in their guts, 

Overall, the benefits of adding grape pomace were comparable to those recorded in the birds that received the conventional antibiotic treatment. It’s still not known why grape pomace has this antibiotic-like effect, but the researchers speculate that it could have something to do with a series of bioactive compounds contained in the waste including flavonoids, polyphenols, and tannins, which have been shown to reduce inflammation and to have antibacterial qualities. All of that potential sits untapped in wine waste, like buried treasure. 

But at least now there’s a possible alternative. Fermentation to make wine, and then to treat chickens might be exactly the circular solution that both these industries need. 

Tako et. al. “Dietary grape pomace mitigates high-NSP-induced inflammation and production loss via microbiome-SCFA-immune mediated pathways.” npj Biofilms and Microbiomes. 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene

We hear it all the time: “Americans just love their cars.” But the recent opening of a subway line in Los Angeles proves that Americans are even more crazy for transit — and when new stations open, they turn it into a party.

Check out this dispatch from Los Angeles by Hideaki Transit, where the opening of the new Metro D Line extension turned into nothing short of Woodstock for NUMTOTs. Complete with off-color puns, viral merch, spontaneous group chants, and even a pop-up furry convention, this raucous celebration of shared transportation should inspire leaders across the country to build party-worthy transit projects everywhere. (And yes, we promise: it’s safe for work.)