Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It’s tempting to equate Gaia with the Living Earth, or Mother Earth, and in fact I often say exactly that. Such constructions place emphasis on the element of earth beneath us, but Gaia is also constituted by the air around us, and the rivers and oceans, and all life — including us.
Welcome to the seductive, but regrettable world of unquestioned positive thinking, where faith healers, BS slingers, pseudoscientists, and get-rich-quick schemers all peddle the same basic message: think positively, and it’ll all work out.
In Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy, Tina Nabatchi and I defined civic infrastructure as “the laws, processes, institutions, and associations that support regular opportunities for people to connect with each other, solve problems, make decisions, and celebrate community.”
The power to communicate aesthetic pleasure and thereby to feel profound affinity with other people, including individuals of other species, propel human culture forward in ways that are hard to measure, but that are impossible to ignore. These are powers that provide hope for our future.
Men are best connected through kinship to a caring household (so are women, but that seems to be easier to achieve), and households in turn are best connected to wider networks of social institutions.
The clock is ticking. In the upcoming months, we’ll need to strive for a leap even as we brace ourselves for a slide.
Providing sufficient access to affordable food for its population is an underpinning prerequisite for any properly functioning society, and given the clear risks posed by the UK’s current heavy reliance on imports, far more domestic – particularly locally based – food production must be established as a matter of urgency, i.e. before people begin to go hungry.
Stephanie Rearick is the Founder and former Co-Director of the Dane County TimeBank (DCTB) – a 2800-member time exchange, and Creative Director of Mutual Aid Networks, a new type of networked cooperative. She answers the question of What Could Possibly Go Right?
Can civil disobedience ever be justified in a democracy? How does Extinction Rebellion relate to other social movements in history that have also practiced civil disobedience to advance social progress?
It’s a major challenge for us as a society to learn again how to see the world as populated by entities that are far more marvellous than car collections and museum galleries. And to recognize that they require a transformation in our ways of living and cohabiting.
In a world where crises come in global form – whether it is the climate crisis, economic crisis or another pandemic – the idea that we can simply ship our problems away to some distant outpost is no longer a sustainable belief, if it ever was.
If positive feedbacks can be the way we describe how the world unravels and declines, perhaps it’s time we started using them as a way of describing what is so evident in Wellington: that self-reinforcing expansion of confidence and sense of what’s possible that comes from seeing real people creating real change on the ground.
