Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I don’t know who will turn a profit first, Stephen or I, but we’ll both keep putting in the labour. It’s what we do, bounty or not. Is he a farmer? Of course. Am I a writer? – I don’t know why that answer comes with more difficulty. But I look to the land, to my generation with its multi-year commitments: development, sustainability, security. To their faith in place. I have faith, too. I am a writer. And I keep farming.
“The grass was tall, and the house was in bad shape,” Alan remembers. But somehow it became home — the couple raised four children there. And they wound up restoring not just the once-vacant house, but the downtown community around it, as well.
Free trade and the freedom of capital to move across borders have been the cutting edge of globalization. They’ve also led to the succession of crises that have led to the widespread questioning of capitalism as a way of organizing economic life — and of its paramount ideological expression, neoliberalism.
The National Movement of Maya Weavers think it’s time for Guatemala to safeguard their textile creations and the very fabric of Maya philosophy. But the Weavers aren’t just politely asking for change. Last month, they introduced a new bill in Congress to have their collective intellectual property rights recognized under Guatemalan law.
We CAN navigate the turbulence of our times by recognizing that the real state of power is culture. What I mean by this is that it is cultural narratives that drive our behaviors.
I remember the birth of antipolitics. I was a young woman when dissidents in the communist world began to associate official political activity with support for an immoral order. Voting, they believed, was an empty gesture if the ruling party won 99% of the ballots cast.
The bus turning circle just off Tooting High Street is not a place that would usually inspire carnival, creativity and dancing in the street. As I say, not a place that would usually inspire great creativity, but that was until members of Transition Town Tooting started to look at it through their ‘Transition glasses’.
As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.
Science studies scholar Bruno Latour is fond of the film “Life of Pi” for the metaphor it provides for our current predicament. The main character of the film, Pi, ends up in a lifeboat with a tiger, and not a friendly one. Though Pi builds a raft to give himself distance from the tiger, he must still tie the raft to the lifeboat which holds all the supplies–food, fresh water, and, as we see later, flares. Ultimately, the destruction of his raft forces him to return to the lifeboat and find a way to live with the tiger.
Imagination to me is about expanding our range of values and saying, “What really matters? Why does it matter? What kind of people can we be? And how can we start to translate that into the spaces that we live in, and not just keep it in the private sphere, which is about beliefs or our hobbies, or our campaigns?”
Mayors across the country have vowed to deliver on the goals of the Paris climate accord in defiance of President Trump’s decision to back out. But how can they, realistically, when the national government is questioning climate science and promoting coal, fracking, and pipelines? Simply put: Make energy public.
The possibility that artificial creatures, products of human hands, might achieve sentience and take on an active role in society is an age-old conception in world cultures, the subject of myths, stories, moral fables, and philosophical speculation.
