Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I do not look forward to the future like I used to. I do not sit and dream about the life I will lead or the things I will do. In fact, these days, I have to force myself to think about it. Dreaming is effort. Imagination is work. Hope is complicated.
In these times of economic, climate and political challenges, how do we move forward toward the world we collectively long for? Undaunted by language and cultural differences, this is a story of community collaboration, with the important ingredient of persistent insistence on the goal of ecosystem restoration.
I returned from my time there with some thoughts, some reflections, which I hope will prove useful in the battles that lie ahead, in the ongoing uphill push to wrestle our future back from insane men who feel it is OK to dash headlong into creating the conditions in which we no longer have one. And a future that could be so, so beautiful.
To repent is to feel such direct sorrow at what you have caused that you turn your life around. You are not passingly sorry. You are sorry for the rest of your days, and come to cherish this sorrow as it reminds you to care about the lives you touch. You may stumble, but you correct course as soon as you are a half a degree off.
It’s not as hard as you might think. If you have the right action for a couple of seasons — the Earth actually wants to be full of life. That’s it’s nature. We actually have to work to get it to not do that. So if we just get behind her and breathe life into what she’s already doing, it can change pretty fast. But we need the tools and we need the skills and we need the knowledge and most of all the wisdom that supports all of these things.
Repeating and evolving. We are learning together. You are welcome in. Your voice is needed. Your transformation of shock and grief into response and relief is needed. We’re all in this together. Humanity finally has a common challenge.
The minute there’s an orthodoxy of language and an orthodoxy of thought, which we all feel we have to stay within otherwise we’re going to get punished, or cancelled, then that’s the end of expression, that’s the end of any attempt to explore outside the boundaries. It’s what every orthodoxy from fascism to communism to theocracy tries to impose on the people to purify the culture, by forcing out anyone who thinks or speaks incorrectly.
One of the key tools the Karuk have long used to maintain this natural wealth is fire, something I’ve learned about in my time as a research collaborator and consultant working for the Karuk Tribe. Indeed, fire records obtained from studies in California clearly indicate that Native land management has shaped the evolutionary trajectory of the region for at least 12,000 years.
It was a quote by my late friend and mentor David Fleming that tipped me over into thinking that writing a book about imagination was something I needed to do. In ‘Lean Logic’, he wrote “if the mature market economy is to have a sequel … it will be the work, substantially, of imagination”. There was something about that sentence that got under my skin.
From revitalizing traditional food propagation, cooking, and distribution, to ensuring the seeds are there in the first place, the Onondaga Nation Farm Crew and Braiding the Sacred are taking significant steps to ensure food sovereignty is a reality for indigenous nations.
As civilization faces an existential crisis, our leaders demonstrate their inability to respond. Theory of change shows that now is the time for radically new ideas to transform society before it’s too late.
Such an agrarian civilization will see no impending ecological doom but instead a future of steady processes and patterns with no need for faith in great technological inventions of salvation. Not a utopian world – surely grappling with problems of their own – but a wise culture; taking the lessons of a past society bent on ever-more for ever-more’s sake to heart and respecting limits.
