Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The capacity of societies to hold spaces for making sense of complex social issues and analyze them from different perspectives is in most countries under attack and dissipating.
If we are to succeed, it seems we need to first come off our high horse. Now: how do we accomplish this feat of psychological counseling on a grand scale?
We find ourselves in the most consequential decade in the history of humanity. The choices we make now will determine what kind of future we’ll have, or whether we will have a future at all.
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.
So how, indeed, can those of us of colonialist heritage and good will do the serious work of deconstructing, then reconstructing and healing our ancestral heritage in our own minds and lives, while sorting out and holding fast to the beliefs, attitudes, practical knowledge and skills that might be useful and beneficial?
The Dawn of Everything was a revelation. The “Everything” from the title may not exactly refer to our past, but it surely may refer to a sweeping revision of how we see ourselves.
if indigenous thinking is truly going to save the world it’ll be a long-haul thing in which people learn or relearn how to become indigenous to their local place in locally specific ways.
In November, on the banks of the calm, reflective waters of the Cascaloa Ciénaga, a floodplain lake extending 12,000 hectares (120 sq km) in northern Colombia, a group of traditional fishers met.
Kinfolk are made by reciprocity. No one needs to be lonely. They’re doing dishes in Mother Earth’s kitchen. Nokomis holds open the door and waves you in.
Ending the extraction of fossil fuels from the Earth while achieving material sufficiency, equity and justice would move us a long way toward the more livable future that the people who gathered outside COP26 — along with billions of others around the world — are demanding and are standing ready to create.
And so I leave Glasgow not optimistic or pessimistic, but infinitely more determined. And feeling like the power, the flow, the surge of Friday and Saturday’s tsunamis will carry us forward. I feel it at my back, I feel it in my stomach, and I will feel it forever.
And so we come to the thorny issue of landownership and property rights in a small farm future, which I discuss in Chapter 13 of my book.
