Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
True climate action doesn’t require vast data centers, billions of liters of water, or mineral-intensive hardware. It requires shorter distances, stronger communities, healthy soils, local food webs, and diverse, place-based economies that reduce demand at the source.
Despite several theories proposed by scientists and philosophers, there are no conclusive answers.
What I want to do in this post, just for fun (well, more than that), is use the rules of this game to show how hard it is to make a strong and clear case for a point that would still be tough to make if I could use all words. I think/hope we can learn from it.
We’re in a period where relational patterns are shaping how people cope and also how they relate to power. Naming these patterns matters because they are often carried privately, interpreted as personal failure rather than understood as responses to shared conditions.
I’m not suggesting that nothing has changed, nor that religion has faded into the background. Religious themes remain highly pronounced today, especially in American culture. At the same time, these theological structures have been secularized in ways that now shape experience far beyond formal belief.
This week’s Frankly unpacks humans’ current identification with the label “consumer.” Consumption is something much deeper and more nuanced than shopping or spending. Nate highlights the ways that it shows up across our whole lives – from basic needs and stability to status and mental escape.
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!
If the United States were to abandon that trajectory and take the concrete actions that are needed to achieve equitable ecological renewal, what elements of life in the present-day Global North would we necessarily, and gladly, leave behind?
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.
Two recent books, Wild Service, a collection of essays edited by Nick Hayes with Jon Moses and Uncommon Ground by Patrick Galbraith, share a common theme: they both seek to address the “disconnectedness” of the mass of the public from nature and the countryside. Yet the two books could hardly be more different.
