Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The stakes are only getting higher for those of us coming of age at a moment when this country is changing from something like a democracy to Donald Trump’s chilling autocratic version of America. Yet if we know anything from decades of antipoverty organizing, it’s that the unfettered imaginations, moral clarity, and capacity for decisive action of young Americans can always triumph over the misguided political liaisons of their elders.
I can only imagine how wonderfully restorative it would be if I could always get home before dark… and be asleep through all the long hours of darkness. Then, by Imbolg, I would truly be ready for spring!
Thinking and preparing for a collapse (itself a byproduct of a system of waste, exploitation and domination) will require that people organize on a grassroots level, in order to open up spaces within which they can collectively forge a temporality that will allow for serious reflection, deliberation and long-term planning.
The most impressive thing we’ve ever designed—or even the collection of all such things—is absolute child’s play next to Life in evolved, ecological relationship. Humility serves us well.
There are near endless reasons to downsize to elevate our own value for what it means to be human. There are untold benefits to be gained when consumers become citizens. Paradigm shift starts at home and so do the benefits.
Resilience under prolonged crisis is not built through heroic acts or perfect systems. It grows from networks, from biological processes allowed to heal, from appropriate technologies, from communities that remain open rather than retreat inward.
After nearly two decades deeply engaged in this field, the organizing model developed by the international Transition Towns Movement is still the most holistic, accessible, and effective social technology I’ve found for cultivating more resilient, equitable, sustainable, and regenerative local communities from the bottom up.
Systemic risk analysis allows us to fully comprehend the long-tail of all the crises peaking this year. But it also reveals how we can turn these exponential curves around, accelerating just as fast and as far in the opposite direction.
Don’t cower in front of your screen. Get out and join with others in projects to make your town stronger and more socially and environmentally sustainable.
One major hangup in subscribing to a physics-based universe of material monism is that it appears to remove human agency as typically conceived in our culture. If atoms and their interactions are making everything happen, abiding by rules they (or we) cannot violate, is there any room left for human intervention or free will?
If Calvo is out at the front, all the same, he’s not there on his own. Colleagues in the field also believe that the ‘machine metaphor’ of body and brain is getting in the way of understanding—even preventing us from seeing what’s in the data we see in front of us.
As large systems strain and loosen, smaller systems already begin to form. People create pockets of care, work, learning and shelter that operate by different rules. These efforts remain partial, local and imperfect, yet they matter.
