Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So below I offer my own thoughts on how to move closer to the worlds we want, based on much comparative reflection on the stories of people everywhere who have acted in the name of radical social change, which for me, means something like “deep transformation of a society”…
In Part I, last week, I made the case for the over-riding importance for a major shift in the strategic focus for all democratic change movements, and especially for co-operative/solidarity economics. Here in Part II I sketch out how I think we can begin moving decisively toward community and regional networks with a cultural/structural strategy.
Western Europe and Scandinavia have been held up as leaders in moving to a low-carbon future in electricity generation, but the reality is very mixed. Scandinavia benefits from its large hydroelectric resources, relative to population size, and therefore has a very low electricity carbon footprint. France is low carbon due to its predominantly nuclear-based generating capacity.
Soil is the second biggest reservoir of carbon on the planet, next to the oceans. It holds four times more carbon than all the plants and trees in the world.
Underneath all the jargon and mystery, economics is fundamentally about deciding things that shape all our lives – what we should spend our time doing, and how money and resources should be distributed. This course is about reclaiming those topics.
Now that you have an understanding of your oil consumption, let’s say we don’t want to support the rather nasty activities that oil production necessitates or that oil profits make possible. What to do?
What does it mean to honor Grace Limits? Dowd considers Grace Limits to be “the inescapable, geological, ecological, and thermodynamic constraints to which humanity must rapidly adjust.”
Following in these footsteps, and standing on their shoulders, what this next piece, collectively authored under the auspices of Oil Change International and its allies, does beautifully – starting with its clever title – is present an open and shut case that what the world needs now (besides love) is to leave the coal in the hole, the oil in the soil, the tar sand in the land, and the gas [use your imagination to fill in this rhyme]. It lays bare the logic behind Blockadia‘s attempts to stop every pipeline, railway, port, refinery, seafaring oil rig, mountaintop strip mine, fossil-fueled power station – and so much more.
Yesterday’s installment of the What Now: Momentum Slowed series addressed the likely first blasts of the Trumpeters to weaken the current federal framework of clean energy and environmental rules, policies and programs. Today I am continuing that discussion starting in the agency regulatory arena and moving on to the courts.
Nonviolent campaigns are often dramatic and catch the attention of millions—think of Standing Rock water protectors resolute in the face of a brutal police force. All the more puzzling that the concept of a “nonviolent campaign” is little known and often ignored when people talk about how to mobilize power, for example, to prevent Donald Trump from erasing gains made in addressing climate change.
I said I’d swear off blogging for a month, but I thought I’d just drop by to note the appearance on the Dark Mountain Blog of my review of 2016, called ‘A sheep’s vigil’. And, since I’m here, I might as wIell sketch a little bit of extra context for that piece.
Let’s begin by stopping our addiction to thinking in big structural terms. There is value in the scaling-up structural visions and strategies for growing our movements for co-operative/solidarity economics [2] and deep social change. However, structural strategies by themselves are like a one-armed swimmer moving upstream into a heady current.
