Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In that sense, I endorse GW’s upbeat conclusion that it’s within people’s power to change things and remake their social world – not a power or a social world restricted to particular classes, groups, genders or political ideologies, but one available to everyone.
A prominent paleontologist and evolutionary biologist thinks that humans are headed toward extinction soon and that nothing will stop it from happening.
Maybe we are just Irish monks in a new dark age emerging, copying texts for a future generation to decipher. Yet involvement in where we live is the tapestry of who we are.
The best response to this constellation of emergencies is to actively shrink the technosphere and radically reduce economic growth and energy spending. Our political class can’t imagine such a conversation.
I’ve found it difficult to find a job that does not produce more waste than goods, that does not contribute to pollution and degradation of our planet, and that does not perpetuate social systems of domination and violence.
I believe the key aspect of commoning as doing good things together in the fact that both take their place within a larger collective politics of creating resilient and renewable local societies where people are autonomous and self-possessed actors within larger cooperative networks.
Kinfolk are made by reciprocity. No one needs to be lonely. They’re doing dishes in Mother Earth’s kitchen. Nokomis holds open the door and waves you in.
Deliberation creates a process for educating ourselves—and each other—into citizenship and gives rise to what Daniel Kemmis has called “neighborliness—to finding within shared space the possibilities for a shared inhabitation.”
It turns out that what’s good for humans (in the short term) is not necessarily good for nature. In our current—utterly unsustainable—mode, choices that are thought to be good for humans are usually decidedly terrible choices for the planet and therefore ultimately bad for us, too. Take care of the real world first, and then you can have dessert.
In this post and the next, I aim to lay out some issues about property relations by sketching how they might work in a semi-autarkic rural community or region within a small farm future.
Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) is a Diné (Navajo) mother, grandmother, activist, artist, writer, ceremonial leader, and international speaker. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
In starting to build an economy that prioritizes sustainability and justice, there will be uncountable opportunities to contribute, share, and reconfigure how we go about daily living—and some of those opportunities might just turn out to be deeply fulfilling compared to the rat race of continuous growth.
