Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Consider all of this, then, the deepest form of human madness and just hope that somehow, from the Middle East to Ukraine, Beijing to Washington, we can wake up to what we’re doing to ourselves before it’s too late.
But once car-dependent regions and neighbourhoods are established, is it possible to retrofit them, in whole or in part, to escape this car-dependency?
For most of the time, voices seeking to raise the alarm and respond to immanent processes of unfolding world collapse, are unheard in the mainstream news media.
It would serve us to better understand the spirit of the rules by which the rest of the community of life plays, and work our way into compliant behaviors.
What is small and unimportant in this culture will be its heir. The children will survive and will be concerned with tomatoes and potatoes and frost… and stories…
It’s challenging to hear about collapsing ecosystems and the global climate spiraling out of balance, but by acknowledging this reality, we are able to orient ourselves and respond accordingly to the crises. On that note, I was excited to speak with Aslak Holmberg, an Indigenous Saami who lives on the Deatnu River, on the border of Norway and Finland.
Resilience here, then, is not the naïve faith in riding the storm and putting the world back together more or less as it was, issue by issue, but recognising the necessity to fundamentally reorganise and reorient human society in ways that can allow human flourishing and ecological sustainability in symbiotic and mutually supportive relations of reciprocity and regeneration – and in a multiplicity of ways.
A free and open community grief-tending event in Berkeley, California, set an example for coming to terms with loss—of people we love and of nature.
Michael Dowd’s spirit left his body, in the wee hours of Saturday, October 7, pulling out the roots of him from thousands, tens of thousands, of people – me included.
Ask a Sudanese or a Syrian or an Egyptian or an Afghan what it’s like to live under autocracy. Then ask marginalized Americans what it’s like to live on the outskirts of democracy. For the latter, democracy is like Sudan’s gold and the Congo’s cobalt. There may be a lot of it, but very few get any.
As the Great Unraveling deepens, we need as many people as possible to wake from the false, destructive dream of infinite growth and techno-utopian progress and embrace a different, deeper way of knowing and being.
Whatever is coming will be as historically unique as our present circumstances. The ever-louder rumblings from just over the horizon suggest that, whatever it is, it’s not far off.
