Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Henry David Thoreau said: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” And for that we need books, newspapers and other print media that esteem the truth and with it, create new generations of readers, writers and listeners.
Restorative justice, which baliga teaches, leads, and advocates for, is a huge component of this new vision of justice. As a practice that facilitates conversation, restorative justice allows a crime survivor to explain what they need to make things right, and then holds the guilty party accountable for doing it. It’s a victim-centered process in which everyone is treated with dignity and no one ends up incarcerated.
Henri Lefebvre, a French philosopher from the 20th century, argues that if ideas or values are not physically implemented in space, they become mere fantasies. As such, if degrowth wishes to prevail, it has to leave its mark on space, just as consumerism has successfully done. This article considers ideas of creating space and human-nature connectedness, which in combination, seem to be a perfect match in forming a strategy for degrowth.
If there is any hope worth having, in a time when we are rightly haunted by the thought of an ‘uninhabitable Earth’, then I don’t believe it lies in the triumph of reason, nor in the recovery of an imagined past. If I have any clue where it lies, I’d say it’s in the difficult work of learning to feel and think together again; to come down off the high and lonely horses that some of us were taught to ride, to recognise how much has been missing from our maps, how much has gone unseen in our worldviews.
The “rule of law” to which Garneau refers is not a singular, universal given. He is not talking about “the” rule of law, but about the settler-colonial rule of law, the legal and constitutional order that undergirds the Canadian state. A legal order that is a newcomer on the scene.
For a long time it has been assumed that public opinion is a barrier to climate action. But the climate assembly will likely confirm what the polls have been indicating for the past year: that people are now ready to move further and faster on climate action than the minimal effort shown by the government. If their advice is ignored or diluted beyond recognition, then maybe citizens’ assemblies are an imperfect mechanism for the scale of change needed to tackle the climate crisis. Only a green new deal for the UK will do.
Fire is an intrinsic part of the Australian landscape. It has become more destructive since European colonisation, and over recent decades, we have experienced even greater destruction due to accelerating climate change and changes in land use. Australia could, and should, be leading the world in transitioning to a renewable energy base to reduce the root cause of the crisis.
Here, surrounded by fellow mobsters, John Ball, Gerrard Winstanley, Martin Luther King… we appeal across the fences – by all that’s holy think about what you do! But we speak from the heart, from the ancestors, from the secret commonwealth and loved ones at home – without reason; without peer review…
We built our little house using light straw clay and lots of reclaimed wood, which both saved us money and reduced the environmental impact of building. Alternative materials alone don’t make a house green, though, because even the eco-friendliest house is still far more impactful than it has to be if it is bigger than it has to be.
Maybe that’s the most important thing that I’ve learnt in the past fifteen years: material things don’t make us happy. People need one another. Experiences, building something together, meeting each other – that’s happiness. And we’re being robbed of that because other stuff has taken its place. So yes, I envision a much happier world.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The fall of the Berlin Wall was to bring about one, integrated world market where goods and services freely traversed borders without the interference of meddling ideologues—where the agricultural, mineral and man-made treasures of one country would be available to anyone, anywhere who was willing to pay for them: oil, gold, diamonds, soybeans, palm oil, wheat, computers, software and myriad other products of the earth and of human endeavor.
This remark, made by a member of the Extinction Rebellion (XR) Citizens’ Assembly Working Group, is met by a spontaneous flurry of jazz hands from everyone in the small Kings College London meeting room. No, we’re not all frustrated musical theatre performers; waving ‘jazz hands’ are used in XR, and other activist groups, to express agreement during a group discussion. I can’t resist pointing out the irony of our reaction – we’re all agreeing we need to be less cult-like by raising our hands in unison and waving them about. Everyone laughs, but it strikes me that this points to a deeper challenge in our work.
