Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
To a person alive today it is hard to fathom that the ancient Greeks regarded themselves as living in an age of decline. These are the people who gave us the philosophers Socrates and Plato, the playwrights Sophocles and Euripides, the mathematician Pythagoras, the scientist and polymath Archimedes, and the first person to formulate atomic theory, Democritus.
My approach, as always, is to try and understand the way past societies prospered despite being comprised of flawed humans—people with all the same shortcomings we have today. When we do that, one thing we quickly realize is that the Traditional Development approach – the way we built cities for thousands of years prior to the past century– was a good party, while our modern approach, what we call the Suburban Experiment, is a really bad party.
The Minga, or as I like to call it, Ancestral Placemaking, has been in practice in the Andean highlands of Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and Bolivia for hundreds of years. It is a voluntary, collaborative effort in which townspeople of all ages and genders contribute with their work, their motivation, their knowledge or their wit to finish a project of collective interest.
My aim in this post is to use Frase’s book as a cue to discuss some issues of interest to me, rather than reviewing or précising it as such – but I’d certainly recommend taking a look at it. Like many left-futurologists, Frase in my opinion gets a little too excited about the prospect of an automated and jobless future but at least the insights he generates from these new-old chestnuts are subtler than most.
Once we experience ourselves as inseparable part of the web of life we realize that true well-being for us can only happen in harmony with the whole and all of its parts. When other humans or living beings suffer, we cannot stay untouched. This is what Arne Naess meant when calling for an “ecological self”.
Amid a natural gas boom, could U.S. activists ever dream of a national ban on fracking? If it seems impossible, they should look to the south for inspiration. On March 29, the small Central American nation of El Salvador passed a total ban on metal mining.
The We Are Still In coalition is a loose voluntary group of city mayors, state governors, CEOs, investors and university principals who have signed a pledge, on behalf of their communities and organisations, and an open letter to the UN, stating that they are still committed to the Paris Agreement.
Calling themselves Sunrise Movement, this group — founded by a core team of eight organizers, most under the age of 30 — plan to recruit and train a nonviolent volunteer army, hundreds strong, that will shake up the 2018 midterm elections and make 2020 the first presidential election about climate change.
In considering the Sun Hive alongside my personal experiences of distress, I do not mean to use the bees as a metaphor, to plunder nature for her poetry. Instead I wish to suggest that our reductive attitudes towards both bees and human health may be symptomatic of a prevailing mindset of exploitation and control.
A (social) permacultural view of the world begins with Zone 00 (the Self), ends with Zone 5 (the wild and natural world), and encompasses everything in between. What excites me most about this approach is that with incredibly simple tools it makes ideas accessible. Ideas which we can find difficult to grasp, in a society that teaches us to focus on individual ‘nodes’ (people, plants, animals, things), rather than the relationships between them.
But ours is a world of vibrancy. Ours is a condition of hope and a moment of opportunity. The crisis is here and it is truly apocalyptic. But we do not have to accept that it will inevitably worsen until it swallows us all. We can forge a way out. We have to.
The new Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership provides in-person training opportunities in activism.
