A Portable Hospitality
Hospitality isn’t charity. It is belonging. Only those who belong with soil, people, animals, plants and fungi are ever truly at home.
Hospitality isn’t charity. It is belonging. Only those who belong with soil, people, animals, plants and fungi are ever truly at home.
So let’s make our story one that nurtures and kindles a deep deep longing for the future, whether we have a time machine or not.
How can we explain the explosive emergence of global awareness of the polycrisis over the past year, 2022-2023? Three years ago, almost no one had heard of the polycrisis. What happened?
Throughout the European part of the Mediterranean – an area stretching from Greece through Italy, France and Spain, the coltura promiscua or coltura mista (translated as “promiscuous agriculture”, polyculture or mixed farming) landscapes predominated in many regions.
As an eco-cultural philosopher (and poet), I’m strongly inclined to believe modern humans have almost entirely lost the sense of the word which became our contemporary word, livelihood. Why?
The narrative that permafrost is a material structure separate from earth systems served some purposes but has also led to catastrophe and injustice. It is time to center the voices of people living with permafrost, symmetrically embracing the plurality of perspectives.
Putin’s war has exposed the fact that nations that lack access to affordable energy and those that are most dependent on fossil fuels are vulnerable.
After liberalism, then, I believe the task is to steer our societies towards a small farm civic republicanism of the front porch and not the front parlour variety. I don’t think that’s going to be easy.
If we want a future different from the one now bearing down on us with a full load of menace, we must fight for it as localists.
But there’s at least one other important thing that gets me out on the rails. In a way that no other kind of transportation does, trainhopping satisfies my Luddite sensibilities.
Can the things that are coming together — which, of course, for me would be the positive things, the climate movement and the changes we’re trying to make — outrun the negative things, which are both climate change and its catastrophes and destruction?
We can salvage the good things that modernity has brought that can be taken with us. We can mourn the good things that we will lose.