Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The major themes of Today’s Ten are the continuing conflicts between Democrats and House Republicans over spending and efforts by China to find a way to keep supplying the U.S. with the materials, e.g., the precious metals needed for electric vehicle batteries, and products, e.g., photovoltaic panels, despite efforts of the White House and Congress to build out domestic industries.
So the challenge is to defend distributed property, commons, kinship, human neighbourliness and renewable local agrarianism against the blank certainties of new-old Marxist categories of class struggle.
The Earthward turn is the inevitable turn. We are on that path whether we recognize it or not.
In bottom-up movements towards a more socio-ecological countryside, food is a key driver of territorial dynamics. This was a finding of our research on the ground in phase 1 of the Rural Resilience project. In phase 2, we ask how a top-down tool such as France’s Territorial Food Programmes can help to democratise local food policy.
Tool libraries have the potential to simultaneously decrease material usage and increase access to material goods, both of which are needed if we are to create a more equitable and ecological society.
Reducing our cult-think means living with ambiguity during tumultuous times. But it’s worth the effort if we put a high value on truth.
In Part 3 of this Frankly Series, Nate (just after watching the movie Oppenheimer!) breaks down the logic of how we COULD arrive at a post-growth future.
So make that neighborliness, backhoes, and a devotion to the world around us, which remains beautiful even this savage summer. We’re in a mess, but together we have some chance of working our way out of it.
The airwaves and internet are filled with “solutions” each day to the myriad interlocking environmental and resource limits humanity faces. A very tiny number call for extraordinary reductions in consumption. The rest aren’t solutions at all.
The once marshland again longs to fill itself
with water, and up in the mountains
among the shoulder blades of the earth
energy lies clotted behind the dams
awaiting surgery…
I’ve always wondered where the myth of the “nature-starved city kid” originated. Who first penned the story about urbanites who are chronically disconnected from their natural environments, and how has this parable persisted into the present day?
We’re in the chaos. But there is no reason not to expect order to flow from the simple rules of biology and physics. Just pay attention to the patterns in your surroundings… and then, logically, adapt. That’s following the science.
