Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On June 23rd, 25 Transition leaders from across the country met virtually to share and explore strategies for bridging community resilience and social justice. Our conversation focused on strategies that align with Transition’s approach of systemic–yet localized–solutions, and fall into two main categories: healing the damage of systemic racism and building equitable new systems.
One of our slogans which we diggers promote is ‘reclaim and extend the commons!’ Yet we have been as surprised as anybody else that this extension and reclamation of the commons should take this form of mass community mutual aid.
The more important conversation is not how much must be paid, but rather how much must change. To be frank, all of it ultimately has to change. In other words, the entire system that continues to exert violence against and extract labor and blood from Black lives and communities must go.
We argue for an alternative approach to conservation policy moving forward, one that seeks to move beyond both protected areas and economic valuation. Our proposal is less concerned with the targets specified by the current post-2020 framework, and more focused on the means and processes by which these are achieved.
Through the tangible, day-to-day ways people survive, have survived and will continue to survive, we can glimpse at who we really are — open, vulnerable, caring, brave, dedicated, compassionate and socially responsible people acting with, and through our collective fear.
When it comes to the key decisions that will shape human lives in the post-pandemic world, this new generation of activists will continue to pressure decision-makers into giving them a future worth fighting for.
If there is one lesson all of us should have learnt during the Covid-19 crisis, it is about how to separate the ‘essential’ from the ‘non-essential’.
If ever there was a year to learn to save seed, I think this is it. So many people planted coronavirus gardens this spring that many seed sources ran out.
The collective intelligence of humanity is that of the social ape, not the hive insect. Maybe the life history that most fits us to thrive is creating our livelihoods as competent, generalist individuals working within small collectivities – families, bands, settlements.
In the famous 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and associated programmes, the first step is to recognise that you are indeed addicted. That you are bound to a substance over which you do not have control, such that this substance has become your ‘higher power’, its material qualities and structures of access determining one’s activities and choices in the world.
In the UK, farming is the least diverse profession, with 98.6% of farm managers and holders being white British. The events of the last few months have brought these conversations to the forefront and we have realised we need to act now if this is going to change.
If we focus only on keeping distance but not at the same time on closeness – on taking care of the many relationships that support us – then we lose sight of important courses of action as well as the people needed to undertake them.
