Chris Smaje

If we and our descendants succeed in realising this new green Earth, I think it will result from ordinary people sharing and distributing what they need locally to generate renewable communities oriented to practical livelihood.

I don’t think anything is more important than challenging the notion that ‘they’ will solve the current poly-crisis and keep people safe and fed via existing and new technologies, economic policies and political negotiation. They won’t. It’s time for ordinary people to try to do it for themselves.

We don’t really see the violence that historically underlay and still underlies the globalised ‘free’ trade that defines the modern world because a lot of effort has gone into forgetting it. Better, I’d argue, to embrace the role of the settled local farmer-householder (which in fact many of the Vikings were too) who knows how to produce their own livelihood from the land.

There’s nothing much we can do about this world-as-it-might-be symbolic capacity we have, simultaneously humanity’s blessing or genius and also our curse. Writing, farming and so on were not the cause of our malaise but the result of it.

“The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us … [manifesting] today as an intersection of money, power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits … and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world.”

Ah well, the urgency of staving off as best I can the disaster capitalism that Philip Loring mentions keeps me going, even if it feels like a dispiriting and unequal battle sometimes. Cheers!