Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Our investigation of the disastrous society-wide collapses of four premodern polities, China’s Ming Dynasty, the South Asian Mughal Empire, the High Roman Empire, and Renaissance Venice led to the discovery of an unexpected historical pattern.
In a farmhouse attic turned podcast studio in Corvallis, Oregon, I joined Crazy Town podcast hosts Jason Bradford, Rob Dietz, and Asher Miller to discuss whether it’s possible to escape our modern civilization and its various components (industrialism, imperialism, capitalism) or whether we’re completely trapped.
It is ironic that technological fundamentalists believe we can do anything we set our minds to, except limit the voraciousness of the human enterprise. It will be tragic if this fundamentalism continues to determine our course and the scariest dystopian scenarios become our future.
This week, Nate is joined by Daniel Christian Wahl, a leader and activist in regenerative living, for an exploration into what our lifestyles and communities could look like if we aligned human systems—like agriculture, economy, and community planning—with the natural ecosystems of a specific bioregion to create more sustainable and harmonious ways of living.
It was the cows themselves who had impressed on me so deeply this alignment with rhythms borne not of the mind but some deeper undercurrent, a trust that the quietness brings all into its own order.
We are stretching the material and labor limits of this planet to capacity merely to increase the complexity of our production methods, not to increase production, not to better meet our needs, not to create abundance or well-being for any body.
Instead of seeing everything through the lens of the political economy and civilization, as if they were somehow divorced from earthly systems, bioregionalism proposes that ecological systems be treated as the foundational substrate for everything.
This ‘keystone species’ can play a role in healing broken relationships—with nature and between people.
We talk the talk about getting back to basics, living small, learning simple crafts, honoring indigenous wisdom, being part of the natural world…Well, now it’s time to fully embrace our intentions… while we still can..
How the Rojavan democracy was made to happen should be of deep interest to everyone seeking a democracy built and nurtured from the bottom up.
But the question remains, will New Yorkers invest that activist energy into cultivating sustainable ways to do more with less, while more equitably redistributing the shrinking pie, or simply force the redirection of goods from other parts of the world that have less power or force of will?
My point is certainly not that science as such is bad, but that we should not put it too high on the pedestal and in that process disregard other ways to understand what it is to be human and how we should live.
