The Danger of Inspiration: A Review of On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
By Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, has one crippling flaw—it’s inspiring. At this moment in history, inspiring talk about solutions to multiple, cascading ecological crises is dangerous.
From the Royal to the Prophetic to the Apocalyptic: The Case for a Saving Remnant
By Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
The royal, prophetic, and apocalyptic traditions in the Hebrew and Christian bibles provide a compelling framework for understanding progressive intellectual and political work today, as we face the task not only of struggling to create a just and sustainable world but also imagining a saving remnant that will negotiate a radically different future in which both new and old skills, stories, and spaces will be necessary.
Let’s get ‘creaturely’: A new worldview can help us face ecological crises
By Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
We argue for the Creaturely based not just on time but more importantly on the greater creativity and efficiency of nature’s ecosystems, compared with the limited vision and mixed record of human cleverness.
Growing a Green New Deal: Agriculture’s Role in Economic Justice and Ecological Sustainability
By Fred Iutzi, Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
We focus here on two proposals for a Green New Deal that are politically viable today but also point us toward the deeper long-term change needed: (1) job training that could help repopulate the countryside and change how farmers work, and (2) research on perennial grain crops that could change how we farm.
Life Without Limits: The Delusions of Technological Fundamentalism
By Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
This ideology of human supremacy leads us to believe that our species' cleverness allows us to ignore the limits placed on all life forms by the larger living world, of which we are but one component.
The Woman Beside Wendell Berry: The Most Important Fiction Editor Almost No One Has Heard Of
By Robert Jensen, YES! magazine
That’s the home Tanya Berry has made, in a rural community that endures—at least for now—because of people like her. Over those years, she has honed skills in farm work and the domestic arts, while serving as perhaps the most important fiction editor almost no one has heard of, married to one of the most important American writers almost everyone knows.
When Will the United States Transcend White Supremacy?
By Robert Jensen, Common Dreams
My question isn’t, “What should we do about the overt white supremacists who, emboldened by Trumpism’s success, have pushed their way back into mainstream politics?” I want to go beyond easy targets to ask, “When will U.S. society—not just neo-Nazis and the Klan, but the whole country—reject all aspects of white supremacist ideology and take serious steps toward rectifying the material inequality justified by that ideology?”
If You Want to Be Realistic, Be Radical
By Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
Leftists are told that we have to be realistic, and I agree. But how realistic is it to expect solutions to human injustices and ecological crises to emerge from the systems that have created the problems? If you want to be realistic, get radical.