Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I turned my gaze from the smoke and looked again at the book in my lap, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution, by climate scientist Peter Kalmus. The page I had been reading would eventually lead to here: “Few people respond to facts… While intellect certainly plays a role, it’s a rather small one. Our dire ecological crisis calls us to go deeper.”
To continue… I think it’s about time we headed in a different direction. The mulcting of ordinary people described by Goubert for the peasants of 17th century France has being going on long enough around the world in various guises, often in service of top-down notions of ‘development’ that have rarely returned full value to the people it subjects. So maybe it’s time to draw a line under the cargo cult utopia of capitalism with its promise of more ‘stuff’ ever-receding into the future, and explore the other pole of the peasant experience described by Wolf’s narrative of the peasant utopia.
Now the Wine Country fires are out and Richard is available to come back on Locus Focus for this episode, but instead of talking about the original topic we’re going to look at how all the disasters we’ve witnessed this year are highlighting critical lessons about what it means not only to build a sustainable future but one that is resilient as well.
Although West Street Recovery formed out of Hurricane Harvey, the organization doesn’t plan to dissolve once those in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods recover. The members know that another hurricane will hit eventually, and they want to be prepared.
The new order is the result of a broken process at the FCC used to reach a faulty and false conclusion on the facts and on the law. The FCC has lost in court every time it’s attempted to prop up open-internet protections on flimsy legal-authority claims. This time should prove no different, and we’re already preparing our legal challenge. The FCC will vote on Pai’s internet-destroying plan at its Dec. 14 meeting. There’s still time to let the FCC know what you think.
For me personally this is a great opportunity to create the space for people to come, discuss and really face the climate change issue, and bring in the facts and the data and the possibility of what we can do together to find solutions. Yet my personal experience is that I question the grand scale of COP23. I question even the economy behind it and if this money could be used to actually implement the solutions that are needed.
In Curing Affluenza Australian economist, Richard Denniss puts forward proposals to tackle “that strange desire we feel to spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t know”. This disease of ‘affluenza,’ he argues, “is economically inefficient… the root cause of environmental destruction and… global inequality”…But in my view his diagnosis, as well as the proposed remedies, are far too mild to adequately deal with our societal ills.
Big changes are underway in Gdansk, Poland today. Since July 2016, some of the city’s most vexing problems have been dealt with calmly – even enjoyably — by a changing, randomly-selected “citizens assembly” made up of approximately 60 ordinary city dwellers, who are brought together and given the authority to take action.
So what might the commons actually achieve for you if you live in a city? How might you experience the joys of commoning? Check out Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons, a fantastic new book that describes more than 100 case studies and model policies for urban commoning. Researched and published by Shareable, the book is an impressive survey of citizen-led innovations now underway in more than 80 cities in 35 countries.
An Alien’s Quest is by far the most cerebral and metaphysical of all of Cary Neeper’s Archives of Varok novels. That isn’t to say that the others have shied away from deep subject matter; they haven’t. It’s just that this one takes the level of philosophical engagement to new heights in its tale of a young woman who leaves her home planet to find the answers to the cosmos.
Instead, we’re going to continue to do more of what we’ve been doing. And it’s going to fail. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But eventually the whole big pile of overly leveraged 12,000 mile supply chain debt-soaked tech extravaganza is going to break down and crash of its own dead weight. When we finally get back up and dust ourselves off, we’ll have no choice but to reinvent things.
The difficulty, I think, is that the conditions in which it’s feasible to build plausible ‘bottom-up’ anarchist-communist societies are unusual, and their chances of longevity are slight – either because they’re annihilated by the stronger forces of the centralised state (as happened with the Paris Commune), or because they succumb to the internal contradictions of their own somewhat hidden power dynamics. Still, Ross’s analysis raises a lot of interesting questions concerning the course that a free, egalitarian peasant society of the future might take.
