Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I share Bill McKibben’s sentiments 100%. I have worked in the climate trenches for twenty years, and I have always said that if you think you understand the climate crisis and you haven’t yet had that awful sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, you haven’t understood the climate crisis.
The Democratic primary debate on 27th June was probably the first time that soil management — as climate policy — was ever mentioned at a primetime Presidential campaign event. It was also one of the first tangible mentions of farm policy in two nights of debates.
For too long, we have related to climate change mainly as consumers and voters. We have been responsibilised as meat eaters and airplane travellers, we have been urged to vote for the party with the most green agenda, but we have never been addressed as workers.
The priority now has to be actively to support all divest/invest initiatives (in the arts, in our universities, in the financial services sector etc), and to ensure that our own pensions are invested accordingly. In a Climate Emergency, nothing else will suffice.
Let’s put our hands in the earth and our shoulders to the wheel. Let’s live up to the standards we set for each other and forgive one another when we fail. Let’s cultivate new relationships with one another and the land that honor the dignity of both. Let’s take it easy, but take it.
As climate justice movements across the globe demand “System Change, not Climate Change”, we should remember that “system change” may have to do more with how we organize, than what we organized.
Decolonising the economy aims to be a hub where voices from across the globe and from different political and intellectual traditions can come together to delve into these fundamental questions, join dots, flesh out ideas, and look together to a better shared future.
The desire to build a better society within Earth’s boundaries is reshaping politics. As different constituencies align and start pulling together, we can start to tell new stories about the future.
As farmer and Christian writer Wendell Berry made it clear in ‘The Pleasures of Eating’, most of us eat in great ignorance today. Faith and food have become, literally, like water and oil.
I am steadily on the lookout for leveraging forces that can lift us out of heavy stuck loops, onto new ground. Often these are less obvious elements. One that has been underestimated is the presence of “elders,” whose presence calls us back to a bedrock sense of self and right relationship to the Earth.
Because my world is small, small influences to the wider world can remain large to me and also serve as a paradigm for the far larger influences which they have reflected.
People want to know more about where their food comes from – that’s well-evidenced now. They want connection, identity and trust. They want to know the names of the cows, the diet they eat and how the calves are treated.
