Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Some habits make us unhappy. Others reveal unhappiness. Some do both. A healthy society strives to nurture the well-being of its members, because secure, stable people who find satisfaction in life can work together, innovate, adapt to change, and problem-solve effectively. A country full of miserable, angry people who spend their time blotting out their pain or lashing out at others can cope with almost nothing.
People also flee from war, civil unrest and personal trauma, and they will increasingly run from natural and unnatural disasters, increasingly caused by climate change: unbearable heat, drought, flooding and crop failures. People also move for education and to join family members who have gone before them. The likelihood that they will be well received depends on how well they can fit in to the places where they land, and whether they are perceived to be adding to or taking from the existing community.
What we know is that across a great range of times and places, people have taken practices of initiation seriously. They have constructed and relied on rituals, tied to moments of transition, in which the participants are taken out of their everyday reality for a time and brought to a confrontation with limits, to the rough edges of knowledge and perception, to the lived experience of their own mortality.
As we work towards this new culture, we experience frustration, fear, anger, grief and many other dark emotions, not to mention physical exhaustion. In these uncertain circumstances, which are unlikely to end any time soon, we need spiritual and intellectual courage, as well as persistence and patience.
Monbiot argues that capitalism now is neoliberal capitalism. And, unusually, that capitalism and consumerism are ideologies as much as neoliberalism is. “Part of the insidious power of these ideologies is that they are the water in which we swim – the plastic soup in which we swim. They are everywhere.
In that spirit, and hoping to spark discussions and other lists, these six ideas for system change are humbly offered, because it’s all about building global networks of people seeking systemic change as our only hope for confronting the climate crisis that is worthy of the name.
Nonviolence is not about what not to do. It is about what you are going to do about the violence and injustice we see in our own hearts, our homes, our neighborhoods and society at large. It is about taking a proactive stand against violence and injustice. Nonviolence is about action, not inaction.
To cross this threshold is to become vulnerable: one way or another, you can be changed by what you come to know, and that change may come in the form of loss. Perhaps the loss of who you thought you were, the stories you liked to tell about yourself.
As I have learned about the social life of trees and the intimate bonds that indigenous peoples have with various lifeforms and rivers — as I pore through recent ecophilosophy that explains aliveness to the western mind — I’ve concluded: We really ought to be talking more about animism and commoning.
Even if you don’t follow Italian politics, the recent upset in the elections is significant. Italy’s Berlusconi was the first of the right populists to win power, and now Italy seems to have developed an immunity toward their propaganda strategy: “The idea is to target the lowest cultural level of the population. Use scare tactics, find enemies of all sorts, demonize them, then promise safety in the hands of a right-wing government.”
Everywhere the key to controlling others has become controlling information related to them, and that information now includes your movements, your purchases, your habits (at work and at home), your current whereabouts, and anything and everything you put on the internet about yourself. In addition, anything you choose to monitor using “smart” technology will have the providers of such technology looking over your shoulder as you do.
We can no longer let the distribution method – the market – dictate how we farm and how we eat. We need to develop new tools and institutions in order to cater for the many functions of food and farming. A process of decommodification should be at the core of the alternative food movement.
