Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
The labour of love that is Camp Habiba Community (Habiba does mean love after all), has risen out of the Sinai sands as a result of elevating and empowering local communities and their collective will to regreen the desert.
The intention of Seventh Generation thinking, as I see it, is to better relationalize our world – as in recognizing and pouring life into the organic links that connect everything to everything. The intention of longtermism, on the other hand…. Well, I really wonder.
It wasn’t enough to observe and have a front row seat at issues I felt were important. The students had to care about what they were studying. It had to be relevant to their lives.
Focusing on compassion and personal transformation as a prerequisite for external, wider-world change, Commonland’s use of Theory U processes sets its approach apart from traditional landscape restoration projects, which typically focus on biodiversity alone.
Once we understood the intrinsic value of the natural world, not just what it contributes to our well-being, our economy and the local ecology, there was no going back.
But I like a scenario in which the heroic masses reach the end of their tolerance before that happens. They—we—rebel, withdraw, dismantle, and replace the evil practices with more ethical ones while the planet is still livable.
Since our civilization is not built on a foundation of sustainable principles, it is no surprise that we find it now to be utterly unsustainable.
