Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Obviously, successfully preserving the remaining Amazon will take multiple solutions, both small scale and local and large scale and international. But if you are feeling hopeless about what’s happening, consider joining up to Amazon Uprising and protect some trees, while getting informed about what’s going on in the bigger picture.
Degrowth’ is a good bet. There is sound empirical and theoretical evidence that our economies are dependent on material and energy resources and embedded in the delicate balance of the Earth’s life systems. And if we pull it off, the payout is huge.
They say that your syntax always finds you out. Metaphors can be just as revealing. As George Lakoff observes, metaphors are the devices we use to frame the way we think about the world. In politics, according to Lakoff, it the competition for the frames–effectively, competition between the metaphors–that resolves electoral and political competition.
It will require imagination and political will, it means listening to and being guided by those on the frontlines of extractive projects and climate impacts. Solutions to these crises won’t come in the shape of a battery – they come in the shape of justice, reparations and equity.
To sustain the natural basis of our life, we must slow down. We have to reduce the amount of extraction, pollution, and waste throughout our economy. This implies less production, less consumption, and probably also less work.
A meaningful strike in defence of the living world is, in part, a strike against the desire to raise our incomes and accumulate wealth: a desire shaped, more than we are probably aware, by dominant social and economic narratives. I see myself as striking in support of a radical and disturbing concept: enough.
So, what do we mean by a DisCO?
It stands for Distributed Cooperative Organizations, and it’s a set of organisational tools and practices for groups of people who want to work together in a cooperative, commons-oriented, and feminist economic form.
If nothing else, the last few months have heightened awareness of the desperately parlous predicament that now faces humanity, with an accelerating climate and ecological crisis. So attempts to design assertive policy proposals are very welcome. The Green New Deal is the one that currently is getting the most attention and perhaps traction. So I want to ask some critical questions….
Presidential candidates should take a pledge: The middle class should not pay one dollar more in new taxes until the super-rich pay their fair share.
The age of Enlightenment ushered in progress and left it anchored in our political and economic consciousness. From that moment on, technology has emerged as the key, unique and universal solution to all of our problems. This, coupled with the unprecedented rate of acceleration we are experiencing in today’s world, means that industrial revolutions are occurring before we’ve even had time to assimilate their characteristics and consequences.
The paths to a bio-civilization are multiple – and the pluriverse is already visible in the cosmovisions and radical practices of many groups worldwide. The notion of a pluriverse questions the alleged universality of Euro-Americacentric modernity. As the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, put it so wisely, the pluriverse constitutes “a world where many worlds fit”.
The discourse around commons and commoning helps us see that individuals working together can bring forth more humane, ethical, and ecologically responsible societies. It is plausible to imagine a stable, supportive post-capitalist order. The very act of commoning, as it expands and registers on the larger culture, catalyzes new political and economic possibilities.
