Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The output of COP26 needs to be, as BreakThrough put it, “a ‘big minus’ in emissions, not ‘net zero’ emissions”. But it also needs to communicate acceptance an honest and a truthfulness, that the climate and ecological emergency goes far far deeper than just electric cars and heat pumps, it demands a fundamental reimagining of everything.
Enclosure — the transformation of common resources into private property — was a fundamental feature of the rise of capitalism in early modern England. It involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it.
She is Woman the Seeker, Woman the Gatherer. She is the half of the hunter-gatherer society that might truly have fed humanity — because she still does so today all over the world.
It’s past time to quit the cowboy economics, to hang up the hats and put away the spurs. To salvage both nature and humanity, pretty much everything about how we conduct human society must change. So what are you doing to help? I mean actually doing?
This may become the winter of our discontent as people around the world face a widening energy crisis: rationing because supplies are limited due to delivery shortages, production limits, cost, or by government mandate.
We often talk about justice in terms of the harvest. There is a certain poetic fitness in this. The work that goes into creating a harvest, the sowing and cultivating, is balanced by a commensurate reward.
The climate chaos that we are witnessing makes it inescapably clear that dominating others harms oneself, and that this system of domination will inevitably end—whether through ecological disasters or our collective action.
We know the best way to counteract the destruction of land is to love the land. Love it radically and fiercely. After all, we are the land.
I have no comprehensive proposal for how we can get to “fewer and less,” nor does anyone else. The scale and scope of the challenge is unprecedented, and beyond the reach of conventional policy proposals. But we can enhance our chances of success by cultivating restless and relentless minds.
We have available a wide variety of strategies that can help societies ask, answer, and act on the questions, “What is enough?” “What is too much?” and “How can we keep the Earth livable and achieve sufficiency for all?”
Living with a paradox is being able to hold two different, even opposite, truths and allowing them to coexist in a complex relationship, because we do not, and cannot, know what the future holds.
I describe this dialogic endeavor here as “living perenniality.” I see in it the beginnings of a radical transformation of consciousness that has the potential to let the wisdom of the living world increasingly inform human endeavors.
