Act: Inspiration

The Twelve Days (and Months) of Climate Justice Day Ten: Being(s) Fully Alive: The New Science of Enlivenment and the Struggle for Climate Justice

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Linking science and spirituality more closely to our own and others’ worlds, and seeing these entangled worlds through the lens of poetic objectivity is challenging – and humbling – stuff.

The Twelve Days (and Months) of Climate Justice Day Nine: The Simple Logic of the End of Fossil Fuels (Again)

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Following in these footsteps, and standing on their shoulders, what this next piece, collectively authored under the auspices of Oil Change International and its allies, does beautifully – starting with its clever title – is present an open and shut case that what the world needs now (besides love) is to leave the coal in the hole, the oil in the soil, the tar sand in the land, and the gas [use your imagination to fill in this rhyme]. It lays bare the logic behind Blockadia‘s attempts to stop every pipeline, railway, port, refinery, seafaring oil rig, mountaintop strip mine, fossil-fueled power station – and so much more.

WHAT NOW? MOMENTUM SLOWED (3/3) © The Time to Act is Now!

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Yesterday’s installment of the What Now: Momentum Slowed series addressed the likely first blasts of the Trumpeters to weaken the current federal framework of clean energy and environmental rules, policies and programs. Today I am continuing that discussion starting in the agency regulatory arena and moving on to the courts.

Standing Rock and the Return of the Nonviolent Campaign

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Nonviolent campaigns are often dramatic and catch the attention of millions—think of Standing Rock water protectors resolute in the face of a brutal police force. All the more puzzling that the concept of a “nonviolent campaign” is little known and often ignored when people talk about how to mobilize power, for example, to prevent Donald Trump from erasing gains made in addressing climate change.

The Case for the Power of Culture

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Let’s begin by stopping our addiction to thinking in big structural terms. There is value in the scaling-up structural visions and strategies for growing our movements for co-operative/solidarity economics [2] and deep social change. However, structural strategies by themselves are like a one-armed swimmer moving upstream into a heady current.

Dominica in Transition?

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The island state of Dominica (absolutely NOT the Dominican Republic!) is unique, constantly confounding my expectations. It is a tropical Caribbean island, but not a typical Caribbean island. It is hot and wet, mountainous, with small rocky beaches, few tourists, and a fiercely independent spirit in a part of the world dominated by their powerful neighbour to the North. I was invited by WEF, the Waitukubuli Ecological Foundation, to visit and help them explore Transition as a possible way for this island.

WHAT NOW? MOMENTUM SLOWED (2/3) © You Are Not Powerless: Act!

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I try, often as not, to refrain from raising problems without suggesting something by way of useful answers. There are those times, of course, when anything approximating an upbeat response is simply beyond the ken or need wait for events to catch up. Regarding the incoming Trump administration, any definitive answer to WHAT NOW for clean energy and climate sustainability will require patience.

The Twelve Days (and Months) of Climate Justice Day Eight: Trumpism – The Dirty, Ugly Reality (with a coda on the antidote!)

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So much has been written already about Donald Trump, the election of 2016, and the horrors that surely lie ahead of us, that it is impossible to single out just one piece to focus hearts and minds. Therefore, taking the long view – and why not? Heaven help us if it’s a day more than four years – here is some of the deep background that you might want to explore on those long winter nights that try our souls.

The Twelve Days (and Months) of Climate Justice Day Seven: Take a Leap toward Climate Justice

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The Leap is a manifesto that aspires to spark and inform a movement. I was one of hundreds who attended a meeting where it was presented to a global audience at COP 21 in Paris in December of 2015. There was real enthusiasm in a room of intergenerationals, much of it for a chance to hear Klein and her husband Avi Lewis, whose film based on the book, and is also titled This Changes Everything, had just been released.

Radical Ecological Democracy: Some More Reflections from the South on Degrowth

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There is no doubt that as a species we have to downsize if we are to respect the limits; not only for ourselves but —just as importantly— for the millions of other species that co-inhabit the earth with us. It is timely, therefore, to talk of degrowth in the context of humanity as a whole, and most certainly in the context of the Global North which is overconsuming and overdumping.