Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The unprecedented drop in emissions resulting from the shutdown reinforces an idea over a decade old yet too infrequently acknowledged—the need for economic contraction in addressing the climate crisis.
But my feeling is that we do need to hear more declarative statements like “Sell the beach house now!” from science and modeling.
In the Transition movement, we saw resilience as a way of “bouncing forward”. We wanted to use the anticipation of these shocks to design different and better systems.
King’s recognition of profound interconnectivity demanded that human security be grounded in the quality of our relationships, the systems we have in place to support people when things get hard, and by creating international frameworks to guarantee equity and human dignity over profit.
Despite the fact that the world of the unnamed vastly exceeds the extent of the named world, most people choose to inhabit a consciousness bounded by the naming of things.
Repairing the land is directly linked to repairing a way of life. Not just an ecosystem is being restored, but “home.”
Whatever the future of this broken world, today we can attend to the work of repair and restoration. That does not require hope in what is to come but, rather, a belief in our ability to manage our lives without hierarchy and a faith in each other’s capacity for mutuality.
As Native grassroots water protectors carried on more than a decade of resistance to oil and gas pipeline construction during the first part of December, authorities across the Northern Great Plains responded in kind.
With nearly eight billion people on the planet, we aren’t going back to hunting and gathering. But around the world, often under the banner of agroecology, people are using modern science and traditional knowledge to develop ways of farming that are less ecologically and socially destructive.
We must learn from our elders, so we can enjoy abundant gardens, nutritious food and a closeness to Nature for many generations to come.
No matter who wins the election this week we are on the cusp of major change which will require both top-down and bottom up interventions and cultural emergence. I hope you can play a role.
Behind today’s ‘free market’ advocacy is the power of financial wealth to appropriate the political, fiscal and central planning role that Polanyi, Marx and other socialists hoped to see expanded in the hands of democratic government.
