Kosmos Journal

featured image | Image by Shameer Pk There is a clear and honest perspective emerging that refuses both despair and denial. It recognizes that humanity is entering an era of converging limits – energetic, economic, psychological, and civilizational – while also recognizing that the future is not predetermined. The question is no longer how to “solve” climate change or stabilize markets, but how to live meaningfully, ethically, and collectively within a time of great transition.

The following is an excerpt from Stephen Jenkinson’s new book Trembling, Still (Chelsea Green Publishing July 2026) and is printed with permission from the publisher. Editor’s note | Written in the wake of a Parkinson’s diagnosis, Jenkinson’s reflections move beyond the familiar language of inspiration, recovery, or heroic overcoming. Instead, Trembling, Still becomes an inquiry into limitation, mortality, dignity, and what remains when the illusion of mastery begins to dissolve.

By Joni Carley, Jude Currivan, Olof Elwin, Tezikiah Gabriel, Audrey Kitagawa, Merle Lefkoff, Youssef Mahmoud, Daud Taranhike on behalf of The Wisdom Collective. First, in the new Kosmos UNitive Dispatach series. What is Missing in the Work of Transformation? The call for transformation is rising across diplomacy, civil society, and global governance.

featured image | Pedro Lastra What happens when the strategies I use to fend off wounding become a way of life? Eventually, I no longer notice that I’ve shut myself off from others. When I try to avoid pain or fear from childhood trauma or despair about the world—I narrow what I feel, what I allow in, and how I relate to others. It creates distance, even isolation. However, facing suffering directly does not mean accepting harm. Recently, I made lasagna for my neighbors.

[Excerpted with amendments from Chapter 2 of Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All] We are often taught a story about modern history that feels reassuring: that the wealth and power of the West emerged through innovation, industriousness, and enlightened institutions; that development flowed outward from Europe and America to the rest of the world; that whatever injustices occurred were collateral damage that belong mostly to the past. But that story leaves out too much.

featured image | Todd Kent This ambitious paper explores a fundamental question: what would it mean to align our systems of governance and economics with the Earth’s ecological limits? Drawing on the idea of embodied sunlight—the energy underlying all life and production—the author reframes today’s crises as symptoms of a broad-ranging imbalance between human systems and planetary realities.

Editor’s note: At the invitation of Kosmos advisor and acting CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting, (CIR), Robert Rosenthal, I met journalist Nate Halverson and saw his film The Grab at the Philadelphia Film Festival. Seven years in the making, The Grab examines the money and planning behind secretive land and water grabs by some of the world’s most powerful entities. The mix of players includes corporations and governments, farmers and mercenaries, activists and informants.

This dialogue with Dr. Jessica Hutchings explores the grief and resilience of Māori communities amid renewed assaults on language, culture, and land under a far-right government. Hutchings weaves insights from her dual activist heritage—Māori sovereignty and Gandhian resistance—with a call to remember ourselves as nature-beings. She shares Māori cosmology as a pathway to healing and warns against the commodification of Indigenous wisdom.

DESCHOOLING DIALOGUES Alnoor Ladha | (LA) Welcome to the Deschooling Dialogues. This podcast is a co-creation of Culture Hack Labs and Kosmos Journal. Culture Hack Labs is a not-for-profit consultancy that supports organizations, social movements and activists to create cultural intervention for systems change. You can learn more@culturehack.io. Post-production is made possible by dedicated supporters of the Kosmos Journal mission, transformation in harmony with all of life.

In this conversation, Bayo Akomolafe and Alnoor Ladha explore the entanglements of identity, activism, whiteness, and emergence in a time of planetary crisis. Bayo challenges the notion of human centrality, advocating for humility as ‘dis-ability’ — an epistemological opening to new ways of knowing, being, sensing and relating in the world. They discuss whiteness not as a racial category but as a terraforming project, shaping the world’s dominant systems.