Knowledge versus Ignorance: The Limited Scope of Human Competence
By Robert Jensen, Wes Jackson, Resilience.org
We need to be better students of the exits so that when things go wrong, as they always do and always will, we can find our way out.
An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Excerpt
By Robert Jensen, Wes Jackson, Resilience.org
All organisms adapt to, and are shaped by, their places. There is no reason that humans should be exempt from that observation.
Why is this not enough?
By Robert Jensen, Wes Jackson, MerionWest
One of the universal characteristics of Homo sapiens seems to be that we are a meaning-seeking species. Across time, place, and circumstance, human beings try to figure out what it all means, or doesn’t mean.
Earth Day: Enemies and Opportunities
By Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen, Common Dreams
In a 1970 poster for the first Earth Day and a cartoon the following year, Walt Kelly's Pogo offered a hard truth about ecological crises: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Wes Jackson, “Methodism to My Madness”: A “Podcast from the Prairie” Conversation
By Robert Jensen, Wes Jackson, Podcast from the Prairie
We’re all responsible for our choices, of course, and I’m not excusing bad behavior or mean-spirited politics. But I do not blame Kansans for our predicament so much as I blame the power structure that takes care of itself without caring about the ecological and economic catastrophe out our way.
A practical radical politics
By Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
Politics is the art of the possible, and politics also is the pursuit of goals that are impossible. We can pursue reforms today, knowing them to be inadequate, with revolutionary aims for tomorrow, knowing that the transformation needed will likely come too late.
Instituting liberty: Contested, changing, conflicted definitions
By Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
The definition of freedom and liberty is always contested (at any given moment, people within a society disagree); always changing (over time, societies’ understandings will shift); and always conflicted (we struggle because there are no simple policies to maximize liberty).
Restless and Relentless Minds: Thinking as a “Species out of Context”
By Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
I have no comprehensive proposal for how we can get to “fewer and less,” nor does anyone else. The scale and scope of the challenge is unprecedented, and beyond the reach of conventional policy proposals. But we can enhance our chances of success by cultivating restless and relentless minds.