Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So what, if anything, sets the ‘extinction rebellion’ apart from previous campaigns? There are at least three ways in which XR occupies a remarkable position in this context, relating to its framing of the problem, its understanding of who has the responsibility for taking action to deal with it, and its strategic call for making those responsible act.
While this new rural economy is coming to life, its success is uncertain. It will likely be an uneven, difficult, and slow transition if there’s a transition at all. It will take people of uncommon vision, commitment and patience to make it happen.
Like Wendell Berry, Bollier sees commons-thinking as a push-back against “inevitability,” and as an invitation to hold fast to our ability, as human beings, to imagine an alternative to simple acceptance when we see, as he said in Salina, something “rooted in an ecosystem is redefined as a market commodity.”
People are at last beginning to pay attention to localism. The idea behind the term is old—ancient even—but it appears to be “having a moment,” so to speak, in this fractured and divisive era.
The Trump administration has once again filed a motion to dismiss Juliana v. United States before the trial even begins. Although rebuffed for the second time by the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) on November 2, 2018, government attorneys thought to go back to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with the same hackneyed request to deny the youthful plaintiffs in the case their day in court—hoping for a different outcome.
Imagine a group of people of different ages who meet in order to settle some matter important for a city, a country or for the European Union. This group was not selected through elections but by lot. They make decisions from the position of supreme authority which in democracy are ordinary people.
A murdered ranch employee. A vanished suspect. A stolen rodeo horse. A black helicopter. Angry environmentalists. Menacing oil-and-gas developers. A Sasquatch hunter gone astray. A mysterious billionaire. A missing can opener…
Here is as good as any spot to ask the question asked in the first two articles in the series. What does an appreciation of “inside the beltway” political maneuverings have to do with federal climate policy?
That’s the point of the Extinction Rebellion. To make us all stop and think – to ask the simple question: Am I really paying attention? To what I know, to what we all now know?
As one of the co-founders and now Executive Director of the non-profit division of Cooperation Jackson, Kali Akuno is working to transform the city into ‘a beacon of radical politics’.
Maybe there’s seemed to be a disconnect between the message we’ve been bringing – that this society is knowingly causing the harshest catastrophe in history – and the actions we’ve been taking? Maybe if the wider public see that hundreds feel the need to go to jail over this, they might start to seriously ask why? With these stakes, it’s worth a shot.
Biotime, or biological time, runs at a very different pace and rhythm to human time. It can be observed by recording events in the natural world. These can be as varied as the day the first spring bulb opens, the last frost before summer, or the first sighting of a species of bird or insect in a new habitat.
