Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The odds may be diminishing with each passing year of climate inaction, but it is more necessary than ever to sustain a hope that humanity can unite to reject authoritarian false solutions to the climate crisis and social inequities, embrace the potential for an enhanced quality of life beyond fossil-fueled capitalism, and begin to realize the dream of a liberated and truly interdependent global community of communities.
There is ample evidence that some level of cotton production could fit into an ecologically sensitive farming system, yet the future of this crop in our climate relies on re-building organic matter, carbon levels, and dynamic microbial communities in the soil where the cotton is grown.
Among the range of intelligent and possible responses to impending conditions is to take direct action to increase your household and community food security. There are hundreds of ways to do that, including directly supporting your local farms, farmers markets, food coops, food hubs, community gardens, and so forth.
How do we build resilience economically and ecologically for a rapidly changing world? How do we scale-up hopeful solutions to serious problems? How could we work together more collaboratively despite significant cultural and political differences? How were we going to confront a warming globe and slow down climate change?
Democratic socialism is, I think, at least potentially compatible with, and perhaps even capable of drawing strength from, the small towns and churches of U.S. society.
I believe it’s time now for a global “soilshot” to heal the land. Rebuilding healthy fertile soil on the world’s agricultural lands would require fundamental changes to agriculture, and a new agricultural philosophy.
Raising the spectre of sacrifice is the all the vogue in current climate denier and delayer circles: it is representative of our current moment in time. Having comprehensively been routed on the denial of science, the minions of fossil fuel lobbies have moved on to delay the onset and diminish the scope of action.
While the common tendency with ecological grief, as with most forms of pain, is to turn away in an effort to protect ourselves, if we understand grief and love as interwoven, then to turn away from grief is to turn away from love, to close and harden our hearts.
We don’t view mindfulness as a panacea that will cure the world’s ills. But socially-engaged mindfulness and mindful social action can contribute to addressing our individual and collective challenges.
Our objective is that, for whatever reason, biodynamics can really become the new agriculture. The objective is to gradually permeate the fields, the soils and the minds of the farmers.
The most hopeful and inspiring project of our time is rethinking civilization, reforesting the earth, and rewilding the planet. It is a single project and the most important one we can undertake.
We have a plan: a movement of movements. We want contingents of new rebels from movements ‘allied’ to XR. The peace movement. The animals movement. The social justice movement. And several more. Call it the rebel alliance…
