Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Dotted with ponds and brimming with wildlife, Duckworth Farm is 82 acres of secluded paradise. The entire property is open, save for a fence in the back protecting a relic Black Oak forest. “Just being here is a look back in time—at how this county would have looked 150 years ago,” explains Lorri.
Leftists are told that we have to be realistic, and I agree. But how realistic is it to expect solutions to human injustices and ecological crises to emerge from the systems that have created the problems? If you want to be realistic, get radical.
You are too important to squander your energy being miserable. Indeed, even if you don’t have hope, you owe it to yourself to lead a contented, useful life. Let me explain.
Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change has sparked a global uproar. Yet America’s reluctance to reduce its use of fossil fuels is, in fact, logical. Not only because of the U.S. president’s overt denial of man-made climate change, but also and more fundamentally because it reflects America’s historical essence and trajectory.
A bioregion, in this sense, is literally and etymologically a ‘life-place’, in Robert Thayer’s words, that is definable by natural rather than political or economic boundaries. Its geographic, climatic, hydrological, and ecological qualities – its metabolism – can be the basis for meaning and identity because they are unique.
Your body makes itself from the matter around you. What you eat, drink, inhale, touch, and experience literally becomes you. You are your environment, and it is you. Releasing toxic substances into the environment means injecting them into bodies, human and non-human. The climate system connects everyone’s environments.
The word that keeps coming to my mind to describe this evening is ‘fragile’. It captures both the strength and the vulnerability of my situation, of the puffins and of the islands themselves.
Istanbul, like many other cities, is under heavy pressure from urban development projects. In the face of this threat, the DÜRTÜK collective supports small scale farmers in and around Istanbul by organising reliable demand for the produce from urban gardens, and by building a supportive community around them.
My hypothesis is the following – permaculture as a third wave green movement, with its strong emphasis on a philosophical lifestyle and holistic paradigm, lacks a strong political approach, which eventually will forbid the movement to go from a middle-class lifestyle to a more general model of society.
Let us openly and loudly declare our commitment to our own eventual material poverty, and in this declaration find moral and spiritual wealth. Let us begin to proclaim the unthinkable and think it every day.
Ultimately what sustains me is a rather heady cocktail of stubbornness, optimism, a strong faith in the human spirit and in other people, rage, a deep wish to live a life of service to others, the thrill of seeing people step up and take their lives into their own hands, all coupled with a deep sense of urgency. It works for me.
We can’t predict where and when the next movement moment will start. Fortunately, help has shown up to steer us away from predictable mistakes when the moment comes.
