From curbing consumerism to caring for others, Ramadan has lessons for us all  Nadeine Asbali  Ramadan is here, and Muslims all around the world are starting a month-long spiritual bootcamp: days spent abstaining from food and drink, and nights passed in prayer and contemplation. Mosques brim with life as they open their doors to the young and the old, familiar faces and new ones standing side by side, reciting the same words as more than a billion others around the globe. As Ramadan is celebrated in a nation [United Kingdom]more fractured than ever, it’s not just Muslims who could do with a little of its spirit. It is a common misconception that Ramadan is all about food. In truth, it is about starving the body to feed the soul. By temporarily depriving our bodies of what they need, we forge room for spirituality and introspection, generosity and discipline, to blossom in its place. Maybe we could all do with more of that in our era, where the self is supreme. Self-care and selfies, self-made and self-sufficient – we live in an individualistic age where the I comes before the we. The pandemic gave us a brief respite from that, as we clapped on our doorsteps and made small talk with the people we had previously ignored. But it didn’t last long. We were soon back to avoiding eye contact on the street, and passing homeless people by as if they were invisible. Ramadan forces Muslims to uphold the importance of community. We share food with neighbours, and give charity within our means: whether a smile to a stranger or cash to those in need. With the cost-of-living crisis so extreme that people are having todecline produce at food banksbecause they cannot afford the energy to cook them, imagine if it was the social norm to embody the Ramadan spirit and give so freely that, as the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, even your left hand doesn’t know what your right has given. Imagine if a family forced to choose between heating and eating opened their door to find a tray of home-cooked food on the doorstep, delivered by an anonymous neighbour. When poverty is inflicted by the state, manufactured through budget cuts and shifting policy, it falls on us to enact change. A famous Hadith reminds us that nobody can call themselves a Muslim if their own stomach is full while their neighbour is hungry. What if we all lived by this sentiment? Wealth distribution is fundamental to the Muslim understanding of social justice. We are obliged todonate 2.5% of our wealthabove a certain threshold to charity. Can you imagine the potential for change if the world’s billionaires donated even 1% of their wealth each year?                https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/03/consumerism-caring-ramadan-muslims-holy-month

From Bill McKibbon- This edition will be a touch more personal than most, because the past couple of weeks have felt personal.I wrote the first book on what we now call the climate crisis way back in 1989, and it feels like I’ve spent the subsequent three-and-a-half decades warning that eventually we’d get to this particular July: the hottest day and week and month on record. And long before records too: it seems almost certain that this is the hottest weather on our planet in 125,000 years; Jim Hansen made a quite reasonable case Friday that it is already or soon will be hotter than it’s been for a million years, which is to say before the evolution of homo sapiens. In other words, this is what climate change feels like—still in the earlier stages since we’re less than halfway to the temperature our current trajectory will produce. But more than enough to, all of a sudden, start understanding that it’s entirely intolerable. Here’s the New York Times yesterday, reporting on the heat in Laredo where the current hellish spell has killed at least ten people. One man found his brother dead in a bedroom with two broken air-conditioners. They were used to heat, of course; they’d grown up on the border. “But this was a different kind of heat. This is a magnifying-the-sun-on-top-of-ants kind of heat. This is beyond anything we’ve had before.” On Wednesday, firefighters encountered a man sprawled in the street in north Phoenix…When firefighters arrived, the man was unconscious. There were burns all over his body. His skin was coming off and his internal temperature was 107 degrees, they said. They delivered him to the emergency room. “Basically, his brain was fried,” said firefighter Brandon Kanae, who responded to the scene.When I read things like this, I weep for the people involved, and I also weep at my own failure. I’ve known about this crisis longer than almost anyone on earth, and I’ve done what I can think of to do, and some of it has been useful, but it hasn’t been enough. Others have done more and better, but that hasn’t been enough either. ‘I told you so’ is, in this case, just a different way of saying ‘I couldn’t figure out the right words’ or ‘I couldn’t mobilize enough others.’ Kind people say ‘you tried,’ and I have, but that’s also another way of saying ‘you blew it.’  Vermont was one of many places that took it on the chin this week—huge flooding in Japan and India and China and Spain, but also in Montpelier and Ludlow and Barre and a dozen other places I know intimately. And this weekend, a second round of bucketing rainfall across the Green Mountains unleashed a landslide a half mile from my house; we’re fine, but another family saw their home buried in a roaring wall of mud.....[a strong warning that climate change impacts can hit any of us!] The current horrors are not a reason to stop working. We know from a recent study that every tenth of a degree in temperature rise that we prevent keeps 140 million of our brothers and sisters in habitable zones on this planet. And nothing has changed my basic conviction about the key: we need to keep building huge movements to finally break the political power of the fossil fuel industry and force the emergency conversion to clean energy.......read more, and other climate comments also. https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/i-told-you-so?utm_source=substack&publication_id=438146&post_id=134789579&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false

Guardian-  Larry ElliotKicking our growth addiction is the way out of the climate crisis. This is how to do it..... With the right global economic policies, we could fight poverty and global heating at the same time. For the best part of three centuries, there has been a consensus about the goal of economic policy. Since the dawn of the industrial age in the 18th century, the aim has been to achieve as rapid growth as possible. It’s not hard to see why there has been this focus. Growth has raised living standards, increased life expectancy, improved medical care and resulted in better educated, better fed populations. Indeed, it is a mark of how successful rich western countries have been in lifting people out of poverty that developing countries are keen to have what we’ve had. If faster growth means cleaner drinking water, more children in school and fewer mothers dying in childbirth then the world’s poorer nations want more of it. But there’s an obvious problem. If developing countries are to have the same – or even remotely the same – standards of living as developed countries, that means a lot higher use of resources and additional pressure on the planet. It means an increase in energy use and the risk of anirreversible global climate crisis. Given the existential threat posed by global heating, the concept that growth is good is being seriously challenged by those who say policymakers should be aiming for zero growth or even degrowth economies, ones that are shrinking. Make no mistake, it is a good thing that the accepted wisdom is being questioned.                                  The idea that faster growth is the solution to every problem is no longer tenable. There is nothing new about the current debate. Thomas Malthus predicted eventual famine once population growth exceeded food supplies. John Stuart Mill’s comment, that the “increase in wealth is not boundless”, paved the way for what became known as steady-state economics. Herman Daly, who died last month, long championed the idea that the constraints of the natural world imposed limits to growth. Robert Kennedy famously said that gross domestic product measured everything except that which makes life worthwhile, and his words resonate now even more strongly than when he uttered them in 1968. That said, achieving a steady-state economy or degrowth is not going to be easy. Far from it, it will be hellishly difficult. For a start, it will mean changing the way we think about economic success. Political debate is conducted by parties that vie with each other to promise voters the best growth strategy. Language matters, so when GDP is rising, that’s good news, and when it is falling, it is bad news. Countries are judged by where they sit in international league tables of growth. It would be the hardest of sells for any politician to try to convince UK voters[and all the industrialized countries]they should welcome the recession that is now only in its early stages.  The only way to make a steady-state economy achievable is to harness an anti-poverty strategy to a pro-planet strategy. It is just about possible to imagine western societies where – after some vigorous redistribution – everyone has the income, wealth and time to lead a good life. But even that’s not going to be enough. What’s needed is a global strategy that encourages poorer countries to meet their legitimate anti-poverty goals in a way that is least harmful to the environment.....read on       https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/17/growth-addiction-climate-crisis-economic-policies

From the Time of Aristotle, Mankind has been plagued by 'The tragedy of the Commons......is a phenomenon described in economics and ecology in which common resources, to which access is not regulated by formal rules or fees/taxes levied based on individual use, tend to become depleted.^[1][2] If users of such resources act to maximise their self-interest and do not coordinate with others to maximise the overall common good, exhaustion and even permanent destruction of the resource may result, if the number of the users and the amount they demand exceeds what is available.^[3]The concept of unrestricted-access resources becoming spent, where personal use does not incur personal expense, has been discussed for millennia. Aristotle wrote that "That which is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care. Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common."^[4] The foundation for scholarly discussion of the topic however came in an 1833 essay by British economist William Forster Lloyd.^[5] Lloyd supposed that, should common land parcels shared between cattle herders in Great Britain and Ireland (known as "the commons" in Anglo-Saxon Law) come to ruin, this should be attributed to those herders that allowed more than their allocated quota of cattle to graze on them.^[6][7] While it may appear economically rational to an individual to over-consume in this context as doing so bears no immediate personal cost, such common land became barren and even permanently ruined where sufficient numbers of herders engaged in such activity.^[6] Although provided as a hypothetical example, according to critical scholars the commons’ destruction came about from landholders of the commons who claimed and enclosed these lands, preventing common use    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons             .......and.......        If we keep abusing nature, it will collapse taking us with it. We need a new mindset.....At Cop meetings in Egypt and Canada, humanity faces two doors. Door one leads to untold misery. We have no choice but to take door two  by Christiana Figueres   Over the last 50 years, an ill-fated paradigm has shaped western thought and action: the “tragedy of the commons”. This is a situation in which everyone operates according to their own self-interest and ultimately depletes our shared resources. Ever since the term was first coined in 1968, we have been acting it out to its fullest with devastating consequences for our land, water and atmosphere. The climate and biodiversity crises have made it abundantly clear that we need to correct this fallacy and take care of the global commons. We all need clean air, fertile soil, thriving biodiversity and healthy oceans to survive and prosper. The temperature limits set by the Paris agreement will not be achieved without halting the conversion of intact ecosystems now, and regenerating what’s already been depleted.                                                                                                                                Much of nature is on the brink of collapse because of rising CO2 emissions, industrial farming and pollution. That’s why this year at the twin Cops – the climate Cop in Egypt, and the biodiversity Copin Canada – we need an ambitious, joined-up action that delivers on promises to cut emissions and commits to stopping and reversing catastrophic biodiversity loss and species extinction. It’s time to halt the tragedy, and focus on the necessity of the commons. Every drop of water we drink, every molecule of oxygen we breathe and every morsel of food we eat comes from nature. The evolution of the human race shows that we need nature much more than she needs us!! The major challenge in front of us is not technical or financial. What’s needed is a mindset shift. Yet changing mindsets is not mentioned in many of the excellent climate action and nature conservation roadmaps that leaders consult. It’s time we called that out.Sticking with the idea that the self-serving use of common resources is inevitable or irreversible, at a time in which deep, systemic collaboration is called for, will not deliver good results. For us to achieve a decarbonised economy in which people and nature thrive, we need action at both the local and global levels. One company or one government alone cannot make the kind of difference we need; the transformations must be systemic and exponential, and delivered with justice in mind. It’s only by changing the way we think, from competitive towards collaborative, that we will be able to work together and accelerate these efforts. This radical mindset shift would open up our horizons and allow us to seek others in our sectors, cities, neighbourhoods and regions who we can collaborate with.                       https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/02/nature-climate-crisis-new-mindset