Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So how, indeed, can those of us of colonialist heritage and good will do the serious work of deconstructing, then reconstructing and healing our ancestral heritage in our own minds and lives, while sorting out and holding fast to the beliefs, attitudes, practical knowledge and skills that might be useful and beneficial?
The Dawn of Everything was a revelation. The “Everything” from the title may not exactly refer to our past, but it surely may refer to a sweeping revision of how we see ourselves.
if indigenous thinking is truly going to save the world it’ll be a long-haul thing in which people learn or relearn how to become indigenous to their local place in locally specific ways.
In November, on the banks of the calm, reflective waters of the Cascaloa Ciénaga, a floodplain lake extending 12,000 hectares (120 sq km) in northern Colombia, a group of traditional fishers met.
Kinfolk are made by reciprocity. No one needs to be lonely. They’re doing dishes in Mother Earth’s kitchen. Nokomis holds open the door and waves you in.
Ending the extraction of fossil fuels from the Earth while achieving material sufficiency, equity and justice would move us a long way toward the more livable future that the people who gathered outside COP26 — along with billions of others around the world — are demanding and are standing ready to create.
And so I leave Glasgow not optimistic or pessimistic, but infinitely more determined. And feeling like the power, the flow, the surge of Friday and Saturday’s tsunamis will carry us forward. I feel it at my back, I feel it in my stomach, and I will feel it forever.
And so we come to the thorny issue of landownership and property rights in a small farm future, which I discuss in Chapter 13 of my book.
The output of COP26 needs to be, as BreakThrough put it, “a ‘big minus’ in emissions, not ‘net zero’ emissions”. But it also needs to communicate acceptance an honest and a truthfulness, that the climate and ecological emergency goes far far deeper than just electric cars and heat pumps, it demands a fundamental reimagining of everything.
Enclosure — the transformation of common resources into private property — was a fundamental feature of the rise of capitalism in early modern England. It involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it.
She is Woman the Seeker, Woman the Gatherer. She is the half of the hunter-gatherer society that might truly have fed humanity — because she still does so today all over the world.
It’s past time to quit the cowboy economics, to hang up the hats and put away the spurs. To salvage both nature and humanity, pretty much everything about how we conduct human society must change. So what are you doing to help? I mean actually doing?
