Browse our complete archive of 12 essays.
In the Alpujarras of Andalusia, thousand-year-old irrigation channels called acequias survive not as heritage pieces but as working commons, sustained by an annual labor duty that ties water rights to physical maintenance rather than ownership.
There's a product category that almost no company has ever made money from, at least not deliberately. It's the repair market. Most consumer goods manufacturers spent decades designing products that wear out on convenient schedules, then watched the secondary repair economy...
Here is a number that should give anyone in sustainable tourism pause: according to most industry estimates, between 40% and 80% of gross tourism revenue in developing destination economies leaks out before it reaches local communities. Forty to eighty percent. That's not a...
Here's a number worth sitting with: the World Bank projects that by 2050, up to 216 million people could be displaced within their own countries by climate change alone. Not refugees crossing borders for political reasons. People moving because the place they were born can no...
There's a thought experiment that keeps me up at night, and I've been running it for a few years now. Picture a tourism cooperative in Umbria, a small cluster of family-run agriturismi in the hills above Todi. They've agreed, informally, to cap visitor numbers, share referrals,...
Something happened between 2021 and 2023 that economists didn't fully anticipate and that HR consultants still haven't properly explained. Roughly 47 million Americans quit their jobs in 2021 alone. Not because they found better-paying work. Not because they were retiring. Many...
Here's something I find genuinely strange about this moment in corporate sustainability: the same companies now deploying AI to improve their ESG reporting are, in many cases, the same ones that spent the previous decade producing ESG reports that didn't reflect their actual...
Why balancing stakeholder interests assumes a separation that structural tourism design can eliminate entirely.
Why certifications and metrics fail the Sustainability Removal Test, and what structural sustainability actually requires.
A structural framework where removing community benefits causes mechanical business failure, not certification loss.
