Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The more I divine the interweave of life and climate, the more awe I feel at the life around me. And this leaves me wondering what is possible for others. What might grow in the human psyche if such understanding were to exist at large?
Taken to its logical conclusion, a human-centred global rationality will be imposed and should you – a peasant farmer or indigenous laggard – get in their way, then you should be offered up to the socialist gods, for the greater good. Jump on board, Comrade, the future is waiting.
Vermonters need to conceive of their resilience as something that enables them to imagine new futures, not stand steady in ways of the past marked by homogenous identities that sometimes do more harm than help.
Limits are a necessary part of bringing about the life I long for, and of caring for the people, places, and futures we’ve all been entrusted to keep.
If the grounded sense of beauty Momaday derived from Kiowa cultural expressions is to play a role in shaping our response to social and ecological collapse, it will need a territory that can sustain it.
Maybe changing the world is not just about spreading relevant information, and acting on it… and more about building communities that can enable us to unlearn what stands in the way of change.
As we navigate the path ahead of us, there’s a long list of goals and tasks on our list to strengthen our community, support our friends and neighbors, and create a thriving space where our crops and the people around us can flourish and benefit from the resilience we are contributing.
Microcosm: a community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristic qualities or features of something much larger.
It’s an economy in which the essentials of life – housing, energy, land, food, water, transport, social care, the means of exchange etc. are owned in common, in communities, rather than by absentee landlords, corporations or the state.
This year Post Carbon Institute has leaned into the “Great Unraveling” as a label for framing what’s happening in modern society and the natural world. In short, the Great Unraveling represents humanity’s comeuppance from overshoot, a time when debts are coming due and the promise of everlasting growth is fading.
Our weeds are just where they belong, in our fields, along our roads, in every compromised, degraded, or devastated ecosystem. Free food and medicine in our backyards. Essential for ecosystem restoration, perhaps they will also be essential for our future food and medicine.
While mathematics and chess offer more-or-less “tame” problems with solutions that everyone agrees on, wicked problems lack clarity and are subject to real-world constraints that prevent risk-free resolution.
