Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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In a matter of months, the language of climate emergency has exploded into public space in a spectacular way, with national, regional and governments adopting the term.
While Earth has not been this warm in human history, we can learn about coping with climate change by looking to the Classic Maya civilization that thrived between A.D. 250-950 in Eastern Mesoamerica, the region that is now Guatemala, Belize, Eastern Mexico, and parts of El Salvador and Honduras.
When we recognize that disaffection, anxiety and stress are not just our own fault but are connected to structural causes, mindfulness becomes fuel for igniting resistance.
Raahgiri Day is one of the world’s most recognizable open streets events—a weekly event in which residents of Delhi, India reclaim their streets from cars.
Rather than the neoliberal image of the school as business and ‘exam factory’, the image of the common public school is as a public space and public resource, a place of encounter for citizens of all ages where they participate together in projects of environmental, social, cultural, political and economic significance.
As a story teller and pot-stirrer and social innovator I am now on the hunt for what will put the soil and water and regeneration story on everyone’s lips, to have teenagers to grandmothers march for healthy soil, to have policies that transform degraded land into garden landscapes.
I want to propose that we the people agree to change the meaning of the GND acronym to Green New Directions and start to consider seriously the crop of ideas—some old, many new—now being presented by Democratic presidential candidates and Republican and Democratic members of Congress as a starting point to reach a national consensus.
I can already see a growing recognition that connection, inclusion, creativity and celebration are the keys to a genuinely better future.
As a parish priest and Christian Climate Action member put it to me, the ecological crisis is also a “spiritual crisis.” Certainly it seems to be a crisis that requires and justifies spiritual responses and resources – a coalition of religion, ritual and rebellion.
A National Imagination Act could have a key role to play in making that a reality. What would you do? How would you enable the imagination to flourish where you live, work, study? What if…
While we recognize the powerful forces of social reproduction that stymie progressive change and make addressing climate change in time highly unlikely, a trajectory for social transformation has begun and we must stand up together to demand change.
