Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This year Post Carbon Institute has leaned into the “Great Unraveling” as a label for framing what’s happening in modern society and the natural world. In short, the Great Unraveling represents humanity’s comeuppance from overshoot, a time when debts are coming due and the promise of everlasting growth is fading.
Our weeds are just where they belong, in our fields, along our roads, in every compromised, degraded, or devastated ecosystem. Free food and medicine in our backyards. Essential for ecosystem restoration, perhaps they will also be essential for our future food and medicine.
While mathematics and chess offer more-or-less “tame” problems with solutions that everyone agrees on, wicked problems lack clarity and are subject to real-world constraints that prevent risk-free resolution.
America has no idea how to live after the end of fossil fuels. When the country is ready to listen, ecosocialism can provide the answers it needs.
A Mennonite book on the coming crisis: “We are fighting to dismantle structures designed to remove Indigenous Peoples from their land so that our economic system can continue to extract and consume resources at an ever-increasing pace. This growth-based system, designed to generate wealth and profits for individuals, is threatening the survival of all life on this planet. Climate change, I have realized, is only one symptom of the real threat, which is ecological overshoot. “
Many articles on environmental topics are secular homilies, bristling with shoulds and shouldn’ts. Don’t use a gasoline-powered leaf blower. Buy an electric car instead of a gas-powered car. … If you don’t behave right, we will all go to climate hell. But what if we humans actually don’t have free will—the ability to act without constraints of circumstances, necessity, or fate? Is it possible to organize mass behavioral change in its absence?
We’ve tried tackling climate change through models that prop up the economically and morally crippled structures of the past, let’s try an approach that looks to the future with courage, vision, and imagination.
This is the place, I want to say, where work which has no obvious or direct connection to the suffering, cruelty and injustice in our news feeds may nonetheless be part of what is called for in response.
In general terms, we ought to expand our consideration to value the whole. It’s not we humans that matter, but WE, the community of life. Now let’s act like it.
A new mass constituency for fundamental change – the new way of reasoning made flesh – is visible amidst the blight and the rot. No member of this constituency would find it reasonable to trade clean air for cheap household items, health and justice for toys and gadgets.
As we face the need to limit our environmental impacts, drawing attention to pre-industrial cultures and their ecological contexts may offer some useful pointers towards a viable future.
The prescription for despair is collective action where it is possible to act most fruitfully. Any journey starts from where we live. It starts by beginning to build the future in place.
