This essay is adapted from the book This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning. https://blueearbooks.com/this-i-dont-believe/

Some of the things I’ve learned in four decades of academic and activist work, and the books that were important to me at the beginning of that education.

A sustainable future requires “fewer (people) and less (consumption),” along with more humility.

Remembering the power of Wendell Berry’s writing.

This essay is adapted from This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, which will be published in September. https://blueearbooks.com/this-i-dont-believe/

My work experience—spanning six decades and a wide variety of jobs—illustrates why the claims of working-class authenticity that are prized in today’s politics are so fraught.

I want to speak in favor of intellectual diversity for individuals (because we all need to remember to keep an open mind). In my three decades in academia, I saw too many professors hang on too tightly to the conventional wisdom of their intellectual gang rather than entertain new ways of thinking.

Cornelia Gipson is trying to understand the hold that whiteness has on white people.

Architect/farmer Caitlin Taylor said that one problem in today’s food system is “the missing middle.” Between a globalized corporate industry on one end of the spectrum and local farmers markets on the other, there is not enough regional storage and processing infrastructure, either for small farmers who need to sell crops or for businesses that make and bake food products.

Members of dominant classes have uneasy standing in movements that challenge their class power and privilege. Can we contribute to intellectual debates and political change without replicating a dominance dynamic? Why should anyone trust us? Should we trust ourselves?

Profile of ecologist Bill Rees and the origins of ecological footprint analysis.

“Prairie Prophecy,” a film about the work of ecologist Wes Jackson, is now available through PBS.

Bajaj was born in India in 1981 and has lived in Canada since 1998. In 2021, she took the leadership job at Population Balance, a small U.S.-based nonprofit that is growing in influence through its two podcasts (“Overshoot” and “Beyond Pronatalism”), research reports, media articles, guest presentations, and Bajaj’s debating skills. She also is a senior lecturer at Antioch University, where she teaches graduate courses about the links between pronatalism and human supremacy.

Wes Jackson—who was one of the first people to use the term “sustainable agriculture” in print—loves to tell the story of almost getting a D in a botany course and describes himself as a misfit.