Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Eight years ago, the Ecosystem Restoration Communities (ERC) movement began with a simple but powerful belief: that everyday people everywhere could restore the land beneath their feet and, in doing so, restore hope for our shared future.
Despite several theories proposed by scientists and philosophers, there are no conclusive answers.
What I want to do in this post, just for fun (well, more than that), is use the rules of this game to show how hard it is to make a strong and clear case for a point that would still be tough to make if I could use all words. I think/hope we can learn from it.
We’re in a period where relational patterns are shaping how people cope and also how they relate to power. Naming these patterns matters because they are often carried privately, interpreted as personal failure rather than understood as responses to shared conditions.
I’m not suggesting that nothing has changed, nor that religion has faded into the background. Religious themes remain highly pronounced today, especially in American culture. At the same time, these theological structures have been secularized in ways that now shape experience far beyond formal belief.
The stakes are only getting higher for those of us coming of age at a moment when this country is changing from something like a democracy to Donald Trump’s chilling autocratic version of America. Yet if we know anything from decades of antipoverty organizing, it’s that the unfettered imaginations, moral clarity, and capacity for decisive action of young Americans can always triumph over the misguided political liaisons of their elders.
I can only imagine how wonderfully restorative it would be if I could always get home before dark… and be asleep through all the long hours of darkness. Then, by Imbolg, I would truly be ready for spring!
Thinking and preparing for a collapse (itself a byproduct of a system of waste, exploitation and domination) will require that people organize on a grassroots level, in order to open up spaces within which they can collectively forge a temporality that will allow for serious reflection, deliberation and long-term planning.
The most impressive thing we’ve ever designed—or even the collection of all such things—is absolute child’s play next to Life in evolved, ecological relationship. Humility serves us well.
There are near endless reasons to downsize to elevate our own value for what it means to be human. There are untold benefits to be gained when consumers become citizens. Paradigm shift starts at home and so do the benefits.
Resilience under prolonged crisis is not built through heroic acts or perfect systems. It grows from networks, from biological processes allowed to heal, from appropriate technologies, from communities that remain open rather than retreat inward.
After nearly two decades deeply engaged in this field, the organizing model developed by the international Transition Towns Movement is still the most holistic, accessible, and effective social technology I’ve found for cultivating more resilient, equitable, sustainable, and regenerative local communities from the bottom up.
