Finding comfort in the wrong things kept me complacent. Perhaps it’s the same for you. This is a list of things that no longer comfort me, and why. Don’t get me wrong, we all need to find some level of comfort in our daily surroundings & activities, otherwise we can…

Version anglaise ici. Aujourd’hui, j‘ai donné une conférence sur le climat dans mon ancienne école secondaire à Genève — et j’ai reçu un cours magistral sur nos défaillances. Ceci est l’histoire d’une journée qui m’a bouleversée. Ce n’était pas ma première conférence sur le climat dans un lycée. En 2019…

Traduction française ici. Versión en español aquí. Thanks to @AAretxaba & @PepeCampana_Com for the translation. Deutsche Übersetzung hier. Today I went to give a climate talk at my old high school in Geneva — and was given a masterclass in our failings. This is the story of a day that…

I recently had an extraordinary and rare experience, as an academic, activist and citizen: I participated in a victorious movement. Doing this upended most of what I thought I knew about how change happens in the world, and it seems very important to share these insights with you, despite my…

Contexte: j’ai écrit cette lettre suite au dénouement victorieux de la grève de la faim de Guillermo Fernandez, à un politicien qui a exprimé de l’intérêt et de la consternation pour l’action de Guillermo, mais (comme beaucoup d’autres) a préféré présenter les efforts et institutions suisses comme infaillibles, plutôt que…

Warning: medley ahead. This is a blog post about anarchist-anthropologist David Graeber, documentary-maker Adam Curtis, children’s TV creator Mister Rogers, comic-strip writer Seth Tobocman, trade union newspapers, Switzerland and alternative economics. It all made sense to me when I sat down to write. It will contain some “square words” (=swear…

If I were into clickbait, I’d call this a story about cancel culture vs. a culture of cancellation, but I’m not. Also, to be honest, I am writing this while insomniac, stressed and exhausted. I am going to make sweeping oversimplifications (“left” and “right” being the most egregious, perhaps). I…

A short course in planetary time, for planetary survival — This is less of a blog post, and more of a howl. The planetary climate clock, in human time Let’s start by some human and planetary timescales. I don’t know why we don’t learn them in grade school (I never learned them at all). But they matter. And let’s represent them visually, in a stark, plain way.

You should always at least try to meet your heroes, especially when they are as immense as Kirk Smith, so when I attended a conference in Berkeley in 2011 (one of my last long-haul work flights), I wrote to him to see if we could meet. Characteristically generously, he said…