Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Everyone can and will find their own way of coping or even thriving within a new context. That context will include disruption to our lives, much less certainty about the future, and less acceptance of current societal norms.
The threat of climate change is too grave for us to continue thinking that we can work our way around it without major (revolutionary) changes that will radically alter the very social fabric beyond capitalism and statecraft.
Instead of the ‘best of all possible worlds’, then, the responsibility is to identify the ‘least bad of all likely worlds’ and the ways it may be realized.
It is Independence Day. This is the worst holiday ever created. Even if you leave out the explosions.
Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. He addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
The somber truth is that the vast bulk of nature’s staggering abundance has already disappeared. We live in a world characterized primarily by the relative silence and emptiness of its natural spaces.
When you put these examples of cultural revival, land restoration, and community healing together, it shows us that restoration is not so much about “finally making peace with nature”, as it is about finally making peace with our cultural past.
The function of imagination is to bring “longing into the world”—I’d say that what this does is to create a narrative gap that we are then moved to fill.
I have had some success over the years in talking with people who on the surface do not seem to be very much like myself.
In the end, I commend my mother’s words to President Biden–words I myself should have paid more attention to—there are things in this world better left unsaid—at least for the moment.
Juliet Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College, a member of the MacArthur Foundation Connected Learning Research Network, and co-founder of the Center for a New American Dream. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Life’s glorious triumph on Earth has been achieved, not just through increased complexity, but also increased cooperation. In fact, the two go hand in hand.
