Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gwendolyn Hallsmith is the Executive Director of Global Community Initiatives, a non-profit organization she founded in 2002, and has just celebrated their 20th anniversary. She answers the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Longtermism is a lullaby sung to the tune of tired fantasies of human exceptionalism. It is anaesthesia for the age of consequences.
With declining real wages, often precarious contracts, and stressful working conditions, parties that use communication tactics or promote policies that prompt strong negative emotional responses are more likely to attract voters then their more temperate rivals.
In this view, small farm society is almost its own welfare system. But, as with every political vision, no doubt the reality falls somewhat short of the ideal. How would people take care of each other in a small farm future?
Humans could disappear from planet Earth without even a whimper, that is, the whimper of new babies as the human sperm count keeps plummeting.
Colonization, through genocide, land theft, and the imposition of private property, has dispossessed Indigenous and Black peoples of their homelands across the continents for generations.
My book ‘Uncommon Wealth’ and ‘BOOMERANG’ meets this challenge by examining how an honest reckoning with the legacies of empire can help us understand and address the roots of our current crises to finally create an economy that works for all.
What’s clear is that, armed with wisdom from the past and a willingness to experiment that has long been a hallmark of youth climate activism, the movement of the future has potential to further re-shape politics in ways most of us can’t even imagine.
I hope all of you celebrating enjoy time with family and friends, and remember and recognize Gaia’s role in providing this bounty: the food that sun, soil, air, and water grew; and the energy—mostly drawn from Earth’s crust—that was used to process, ship, and cook that food, and to get your family and friends near enough to you to share it together.
To go back to the beginning, while such a thing is still possible, if nuclear weapons, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, fossil fuels, and apocalyptic fear helped get us to this breaking point, we need something truly different now.
Mutual aid is a concept and practice that has come up many times in the stories we tell on The Response — so we thought it would be helpful to devote an entire episode to exploring what mutual aid is with someone who is deeply immersed in it on the ground.
All told, according to the International Energy Agency, the net income for the world’s fossil producers is set to double in 2022 from 2021, to a new high of $4 trillion. This is the best possible time for the check to arrive at the table.
