Robert C. Koehler

Robert C. Koehler

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the Wound" (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

Articles by this author

"There can be good lives for all people if we abandon the goal of infinite energy growth. Our guiding principle needs to be that the only form of truly clean energy is less energy." (Photo: Bryan Minear/Unsplash) Views
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Climate Change and Consciousness Shift
Climate change: It feels like the approaching End Times. But it’s the secular version thereof, which means that humanity is responsible for both its cause and—if possible—its transcendence. All we need to do is change everything about the way the high-tech, global society functions in the next...
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Has the upcoming generation taken it upon itself to save the planet? Is a transnational human unity beginning to create itself? (Photo: Sanmonku) Views
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Bad News to a Sick and Miserable-Looking Earth: "I'm Afraid You Have Humans."
The irony of this old New Yorker cartoon by Eric Lewis is so precise I haven’t been able to get it out of my head for two years. The speaker is the planet Saturn, clad in doctor’s garb — a stethoscope circling his forehead — giving the bad news to a sick and miserable-looking Earth: "I'm afraid you...
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Those who are without power—the poor, the indigenous, the uprooted—are at the mercy of heartless authority, no matter that the authority has global limits. (Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images) Views
Thursday, September 12, 2019
Altruists of the World Unite!
The biggest joke on the planet may be the phrase “national security.” It almost always justifies something brutal, whether outright murder (a.k.a. war) or climate apartheid—the rejection and condemnation of refugees who are fleeing terrible conditions in their homeland, often created or intensified...
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National policy, especially for the world’s dominant superpower, is based on the threat of unrelenting force. Ordinary citizens have begun to hold the nation, and its military, accountable. (Photo: @kingsbayplow7/Twitter) Views
Thursday, September 05, 2019
Defying the Nuclear Sword
". . . and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." These lost words — Isaiah 2:4 — are nearly 3,000 years old. Did they ever have political traction? To believe them...
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The world is currently divided into national and corporate interests that have the power to ignore and dismiss not only the rights of the tribal peoples who live in the rainforest, but also the rights of the planet at large, to breathe, to survive in eco-diversity.(Photo: Rene Rivers/fickr/cc) Views
Thursday, August 29, 2019
We Are All Indigenous
“All things are interrelated. Everything in the universe is part of a single whole. Everything is connected in some way to everything else. It is therefore possible to understand something only if we can understand how it is connected to everything else.” These words, the first of the Twelve...
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"It certainly appeared he was trying to hit us," Amy Anthony, spokesperson for progressive Jewish advocacy group Never Again Action, told the Washington Post. (Photo: Never Again Action/Twitter Screengrab) Views
Thursday, August 22, 2019
Putting Bodies on the Line in Participatory Evolution
The big black pickup truck plunged into the protesters blocking the parking lot and I cringed, viscerally, as though I could feel it myself — this merciless crush of steel against flesh. I was recovering from a bicycle injury when I watched the event on the news last week, as members of the Never...
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He was playing war. My guess is that they’re all playing war, in one way or another. (Photo: Scott Nelson/Getty Images) Views
Thursday, August 08, 2019
Dead Canaries
“Many people think that the fight for America is already lost. They couldn’t be more wrong. This is just the beginning of the fight for America and Europe. I am honored to head the fight to reclaim my country from destruction.” This is how the El Paso killer ended his white supremacy screed ,...
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What's on display is the spiritual laziness of incredibly powerful men. (Photos: National Archives/Getty Images; AFP/Timothy A. Clary) Views
Thursday, August 01, 2019
The Inner Nixon
The Nixon tapes are still in the news! My God, they're still spewing bile, still making America's eyeballs roll. They're as relevant as ever. Donald Trump, it turns out, is merely the inner Richard Nixon, live and uncensored. He's also the inner Ronald Reagan—the inner voice, suddenly made public,...
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ICE has an annual budget of around $7.5 billion, which is spent in absolute denial of our interconnectedness. It “protects” the country by defining emigrants as aliens and denying them virtually all basic rights. (Photo: Ilias Bartolini/flickr/cc) Views
Thursday, July 25, 2019
The Strongest People on the Planet
“Send her back! Send her back!” The chant: Is it merely a case study in collective stupidity or is it a signal of rising fascism? When I look at the viral video—the latest manifestation of Trumpism and the freeing of good old American racism from the constraints of political correctness—I can’t...
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Fighting this war is as much a matter of demobilization—reversing courses of action, shrinking our carbon footprint—as it is mobilizing green energy production and rebuilding society around a green consciousness. (Photo by Erik McGregor/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images) Views
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Fighting Climate Change Means Ending War
"The easy movement of high ranking military officers into jobs with major defense contractors and the reverse movement of top executives in major defense contractors into high Pentagon jobs is solid evidence of the military industrial-complex in operation." I was utterly stunned when I read these...
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