Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As climate justice movements across the globe demand “System Change, not Climate Change”, we should remember that “system change” may have to do more with how we organize, than what we organized.
I am steadily on the lookout for leveraging forces that can lift us out of heavy stuck loops, onto new ground. Often these are less obvious elements. One that has been underestimated is the presence of “elders,” whose presence calls us back to a bedrock sense of self and right relationship to the Earth.
We must use this moment as crucial leverage to push the planet in a new direction. Let us try. If we succeed, then we have risen to the greatest crisis humans have ever faced and shown that the big brain was a useful evolutionary adaptation. If we fail—well, we better to go down trying.
“The sooner we realize that humanity won’t have a Hollywood ending to climate change, the more chance we have to avoid ours becoming a true horror story.”
On that, I think we can agree.
The efforts made by the environmental offices of the municipalities or departments to remedy a situation which in some places verges on the catastrophic can clearly be noticed. The fact remains that a lot of work remains to be done and the internationalist Commune of Rojava is aware that it will have to explore many more fields of activity.
Since this is a blog whose aim is to speak of community and connectedness, albeit from a very imperfect practitioner, here are my areas of concern with the rise of social media, Facebook in particular: It is not some commons of a communal resource. It is a global business posing as community forum.
But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’. It is bound up, intimately, with a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism. And it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.
If you ever wanted to see what the world might look like after the Tribulation, you could do worse than visit the Burren land on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. … the Burren has only rock, with thin soil in the cracks –a rippling moonscape of pale hills that stretches to the sea, with few trees to slow the screaming Atlantic winds. It’s lovely to visit, but living here would seem to us like being marooned on an alien planet, and raising children unthinkable.
More and more of our daily routine is being turned over to software. Is that wise in every case? Is there a limit to how much power we should give to software over us?
In other words, making business cases for better behavior around climate change won’t evoke the amount of change needed; but engaging people’s sacred values first – and then showing that there might be resulting economic benefits – will.
The Totnes pound is just one example of the kind of outside the box thinking that has kept this local community resilient in the face of austerity. Since 2010, the pressure on local authority budgets across England has been intense, with a 50% decline in central funding support.
It’s been said before, but these are truly the best of times and the worst of times. More frequent natural disasters, supercharged by climate change, as well as the ongoing circus in Washington, are waking more and more people up every day to the realization that we can no longer afford to be merely passive consumers of somebody else’s products.
