Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
With everything and everyone locked down, my comparisons between somewhere like Lincolnshire and somewhere bigger and brighter – like London – have reverted back to zero; right now, we’re all on a level-playing field, and Lincolnshire, quite frankly, is coming up trumps.
How do we live wise and virtuous lives with all of our human frailties laid bare by a pandemic? Hume, I think, would answer: with others, with humor and kindness, and with constant checks on the assumptions and certainties we hold too tightly and too often in opposition to others, be they viral or human.
In this episode Asher, Rob, and Jason wonder if individualism (not to mention all those other “-isms”… capitalism, socialism, communism) is simply the product of a relatively short period of expansionism, and what of our values must be kept or discarded as we enter a new era of contraction and bureaucratic breakdown.
As local authorities in Scotland point out, outdoor learning could be the best means of getting children back to school, as it permits physical distancing. It lends itself to re-engagement with the living world.
This has been a long tour through the Wonderland of fake solutions to climate change, ideas designed to splash a coat of green paint on Business As Usual so that certain private interests can keep getting richer…and so the rest of us need not be bothered with changing our habits or lifestyle. This won’t do.
In search of better ideas and better leadership, Asher, Rob, and Jason discuss how we can reinvent lifeboat ethics and find prosocial ways to manage humanity’s shared crises.
Change needs to be systemic to match the scale of the emergency and the inequalities uncovered and reproduced by the pandemic. This crisis can and should be used as a collective learning point for a transformation towards an alternative feminist degrowth future.
Not unlike Einstein’s summons, Planet of the Humans is at least spot on about the need to turn away from our technocentric story and all its delusions that have claimed to give us full control. Then, and only then, will any light shine like the dawn.
According to Cantadora and Wise Woman, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Descansos are symbols that mark a death: as an example, a cross by the wayside with the name of the person who died spelled out in nails. Can we create Descansos for our dying civilization? For die it must if we are to live. Let these words be my Descansos offered in gratitude to She Who Loves Us All.
How will future generations fare in the world of scarcity and instability to which our present-day actions are consigning them? Catherine McGuire’s short story collection The Dream Hunt and Other Tales suggests a multitude of possible answers to this.
The environment, health and economic development are intertwined. What’s happening in remote villages on a Southeast Asian island holds lessons for how all nations can better prepare for the next global shock.
Any tool or circumstance that enables Indigenous people to fortify their traditions, territories and practices, while carrying them into the next generations, will be of great benefit to the global community. The COVID-19 pandemic may just give the proper pretext to support this important process globally.
