Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
To “disabstract” an account, a bit of history, a narrative or story, an image, idea or concept, an academic discipline or theory…, is to re-embed it in a world of history, concrete particulars, detailed situations, context, depth, richness, complexity, specificity, detail, situatedness, place… and so much more.
Violence is coming in smaller and smaller packages these days.
So, what does Johnson’s elevation to the speaker’s chair mean for US climate policy? It doesn’t bode particularly well, although hardly worse than what McCarthy meant for clean energy and the environment.
The firekeeping practice became a way to resist those forces, to access our deep-time knowledge and put us in sync with the Earth’s rhythms and metabolism, kin with the thousands of people who are holding fires and doing this regenerative culture making at the same time.
So zoning and land use changes, while necessary, are not sufficient to transform car-dependent suburbia into sustainable, walkable communities. Many changes to transportation policy and infrastructure are also needed.
India is among the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, but its Indigenous languages have been marginalized—along with those who speak them.
Similarly, it is hard not to look at human supremacy as an abdication of context, wisdom, relationship, and the tangled, interconnected world as we find it in favor of a pretend world of parts, algorithms, abstractions, and tidy categories
This is the place, I want to say, where work which has no obvious or direct connection to the suffering, cruelty and injustice in our news feeds may nonetheless be part of what is called for in response.
Given the scope of the crises upon us, have you ever felt a yearning to learn more about living in a culture that is not based on extractivism, commodification, acquisition, and exploitation? It was this question that led me to Galina Angarova from the Lake Baikal region of Siberia.
Now, fittingly, in our era of collapsing economies, hypertrophied corporations and climate catastrophe, the cosmos embodies our political anxiety.
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?
