Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the day-to-day reality of those struggling to achieve autonomous decision-making, while also engaging with the state where necessary, there is a constant interplay between doing, acting, being, dreaming, and relating … with the actors being not only humans but all of nature.
Instead of seeing the Earth as an inventory of resources – as government policymakers and corporations tend to do – people can begin to see the challenge as how to take care of “flows, networks, and relationships” – the dynamic forces that drive living planetary systems.
Yes, you can grow a lot of tomatoes in a relatively small space inside these plastic hot-houses, but did any of the Icarus-minded engineers and plastic-film aficionados ever stop to ask some simple questions? What are the long-term prospects for this practice? And what will eventually happen to all that plastic?
The certified organic system is part of the capitalist economic system. It makes it ”realistic” but it also forces it to adapt to the system in order to be successful. And as the system as a whole is not sustainable, it can also not be sustainable in the long run.
Our ancient pine forests in Sherani, once crowned as green gold and blanketing rugged mountains, now crumble to ashes due to persistent wildfires.
We stand at a turning point. The tools for impact measurement exist and knowledge continues to grow. But the decisive step is cultural: Are we ready to take impact seriously – not just as a metric but as the goal of our actions?
So back to my original question—how clean is natural gas, really? It does burn cleaner than coal and oil. But if the methane life cycle from extraction to burning is considered, it’s not clean at all.
So the immediate need is for people to come together as citizens to defeat authoritarianism and secure protection for people and the planet while laying the foundation for the ecological civilization.
As was the case through most of human history, we must—in my view—just live and experience the world as it is in its staggering complexity, rather than thinking our way into how to live.
With this manifesto, we are putting national governments everywhere on notice. We are not going away. We will become bolder in our local experiments and in our challenges to your authority.
The wider point here is that we’ve now reached a point where climate change has become a fact of life. One of the problems with this is that people in different silos are used to thinking of their climate change problems as being different from other people’s, rather than connected.
We are not powerless. Every time we make a purchase, especially with our food, there are consequences to our health and the health of our environment.
