Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I’m with you when you say that climate change is the most important issue facing humankind. I’ll even go so far as to say it’s the most important one ever. But, when I hear folks say—and I have heard it—that the environmental movement is the first in history to stare down an existential threat, I have to get off the train.
We already have many climate protests now in Belgium. What we especially need now are some good debates and analyses about what direction the climate movement in Belgium (and other countries) should take.
With the dawn of industrialization, democracy in work went into reverse. What’s important here is that most people know little or nothing of this history or cannot conceive of it in terms of loss of liberty. They simply accept the arrangements in their jobs as somehow ordained in a nominally democratic society, as how work must necessarily be organized.
Perhaps in the years and decades to come the meaning of what is happening will dawn on those whose world is collapsing and conditions will mature sufficiently for sweeping political changes. In the meantime permacultural designs of local cultivation space and residential areas, ways to create soils, grow trees that absorb carbon, re-discover new forms of living and organising may become possible providing an example to those who have otherwise lost just about everything and who are seeking to find a way to start again…..
Black leaders have long been pioneers in protecting communities and the environment — from Harriet Tubman, who in the mid-1800s used her knowledge of the natural world to guide escaped slaves north, to landfill protesters in Warren County, North Carolina in 1982 who galvanized the modern environmental justice movement.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution poses the greatest environmental threat to global health in 2019, killing seven million people prematurely every year, which is around the number of deaths caused by cigarettes.
The three R’s of Deep Adaptation are tasks, they demand we leave a lot of our identity and cleverness behind, our comfort zones, our egoic insults, the traumas we cling to like antiquated gas masks, long after the war is over.
If you’re in the mood for some good deindustrial fiction, I recommend checking out these books by Ann M. Pino.
A senior European Commission economist has warned that a Third World War is an extremely “high probability” in coming years due to the disintegration of global capitalism.
Cosmopolitanism rests on the notion that there are many ways of leading a decent human life. Societies can put together different arrangements for leading a good life provided they respect basic human rights and entitle people to construct families, towns, cities, nations, and larger communities like the European Union or the African Union.
Science is a multicultural enterprise that benefits from and indeed requires competing views. Indigenous observations, perspectives and values enrich, not threaten, our collective knowledge of the world.
The challenge lies in organizing against the growth of far-right and authoritarian politics while simultaneously highlighting the continuities they share with the political center — the overlap between the “exception” and the “norm.”
