Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We can start with the concept of sharing, of commoning, and then try to work out together how we can common the land and potentially, what’s produced on it. It’s anarchic in the sense that it’s massively decentralised, with lots of tiny nodes that together can provide the clothing and textiles that we need to live.
Yasuní has become an emblematic place and moment where the multiple crises of our time converge: climatic, ecological, economic, and political. It is a historical knot that concentrates the global contradictions between extractivism and sustainability, between capital expansion and the defense of life.
One could say that ‘bioregioning’ is our species long-term evolutionary survival pattern and hence a return to it may well be the most promising pathway our species can take through the tumultuous if not catastrophic decades ahead.
If 99% of human history was spent as hunter-gatherers, what can that way of life teach us about equality, freedom, and hierarchy today? We connect our foraging past to modern politics—and ask if industrial civilization is all it’s cracked up to be.
Green liberation is the answer to these dire times of brutality, aggression, anxiety, and fear. It aims to build from the grassroots up and to deliver the Green vision at the national and transnational levels.
Casa Pueblo has defined a clear strategy to scale up its impact: articulating community action with scientific innovation and culture as pillars of an eco-social model oriented toward alternative development.
It’s all so small, given everything we face, that it’s almost not worth mentioning. Still, that drying pond bed is at least a little cleaner, my community a little friendlier, and I am at least witnessing (and trying to alleviate) the suffering in Palestine. Shouldn’t that matter at least a little?
As the ecological situation worsens, we don’t have the luxury of snubbing potential solutions. Let’s not be the ones who died of an illness because the name of the remedy sounded silly.
Do we blindly feed our consumption addiction, indifferent to how—or whether—resources can be replenished? Or do we transition from consumer to replenisher, and become responsible stewards, ensuring that what we take today will sustain life tomorrow?
Our 8-billion-strong “cloud” is grossly unsustainable, so that it will collapse via its own downpour if not allowed to shrink. It’s possible to do so by natural attrition and generational transformation of lifestyles.
Here, perhaps is the secret to also countering the far right, not with ameliorative green growthism but with radical, redistributive, anti-commodity leftism – recovering that underground tradition of socialism that starts from a critique of capitalism’s turning everything into a commodity, and instead focusing on what we all need to lead a decent dignified life, within safe limits.
Failing to stop the assault on the tools to even track our GHG emissions will mean at best the U.S. becoming a pariah state, at worst it can derail the global efforts to curb climate change and progress to transition beyond fossil fuels. Not an optimal outcome in either case, and certainly worth fighting to prevent—one public hearing at a time.
