Do we Need a New Myth, or No Myth?
This is the true, biggest challenge I’m facing as a writer and thinker. Myth: Do we need a new one, or do we need to dispense with them altogether?
This is the true, biggest challenge I’m facing as a writer and thinker. Myth: Do we need a new one, or do we need to dispense with them altogether?
After decades in which the only thing that’s changed has been the language, The World for the Many, Not the Few represents a change in the landscape. This new policy presents a radically different vision for how the UK should approach international development.
If you think there is hope for a decent future — and I do — then make that future come alive for your family and friends. I ask only two things: that it shows a realistic future, and that it be fun.
With enormous changes going on worldwide, with the ecosystem collapsing, with natural resources dwindling, with the human population still expanding, we may be rather facing a Seneca Collapse that will make short work of the European nation-states, just as the current crisis is destroying the American Empire.
Culture is what people do. It decays when people stop culturing. Changing a culture means changing what we do. Often, that will need a step by step transition as we negotiate obstacles.
What are the unhealthy stories that we tell now? The story of unlimited growth. The story that we are separate. Any number of stories about who we are and our place in the world, and what it means to be alive.
The diverse founders of the First Ecosocialist International explicitly adopted a pluricosmovisionary perspective which establishes the conuco, or small farm, as the base unit for an emergent, future society founded upon the recovery of historical memory, territorial organization by bio-region, the rights of Mother Earth, the decolonization of the mind, and the reconfiguration of indigenous nations.
I believe economic localization is the most strategic solution to addressing the woes of the disenfranchized. The localized path would involve a 180-degree turn-around in economic policy, so that business and finance become place-based and accountable to democratic processes.
Progressives reference the ‘new economy’ in order to describe a system that is based on social and environmental justice. Yet type these words into any search engine and you’ll find that we don’t own it, neoliberals do.
With over a decade-and-a-half of American schooling under my belt, I feel that I can assert with absolute certainty that there are some fundamental flaws in how we have chosen to structure education.
Many traditional cultures prove that it is possible to sustain locally adapted, place-based communities for centuries and even millennia through prudent and ecologically and socially responsible resource management and sustainable ways to meet human needs within the limits and opportunities set by the natural conditions of their particular region.
Thanks to Rob for his reply to my recent thoughts on the Transition Towns movement. Here are some brief notes in response.