Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Between pesticides, chemical dyes, and plastic, producing a typical sweater eats an enormous amount of natural and industrial resources. Apparel is one of the world’s most polluting industries, and the U.S. sends up to 75 percent of its cotton abroad—only to ship it back as cheap T-shirts. The Northern California Fibershed was designed to circumvent all that.
What I am learning is that by seeing how the false starts, blind spots, transformative research tools, and foundational discoveries that made the complexity of biology accessible to scientific inquiry are replicated in the struggles to make sense of the human relationship to our natural world today.
I invite you to see with new eyes. Ultimately Guha’s definition of environmentalism is not wrong. It just doesn’t fit mine and many others’ reality of what environmentalism is: holistic; long rooted in time and space; for something and not only against; alive and based in the land, lives, work and bodies of those around me, African in and of their environments.
What matters is the effort to move beyond mere resistance and onto a more substantive engagement with rebuilding – to ask what comes next, and to harness the current disenchantment and loss of faith in a more productive manner. It is said that moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity. There is little doubt that we face a crisis of governance at the moment; this is also a chance to design a new and improved government.
Stories have always had an important place in human history. According to Yuval Noah Harari, author of the book Sapiens, ‘Any large scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination’.
Anyway, I have now read Dorling’s book and I want to share a few thoughts about it. They’re not in the form of a comprehensive warts-and-all review – rather, I want to highlight five themes of interest to me that anticipate some future posts, on which I think Dorling has thought-provoking things to say.
What lies in fact between or beyond direct action, prefigurative communities, and meaningful elections? One idea that occurs to me (and has occurred to others, as well – see Micah White’s excellent The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution) is to combine electing some as yet unknown kind of “progressive” government and forging social movements to push it from below and alongside to make good on its promises, and for the new kind of parties that would lead such governments to make links with other movements, nations, and organizations everywhere.
Are we wrong to believe that competitiveness must and always will be the central animating principle of human action? Media studies scholar Michael Karlberg thinks so. In fact, he believes that another animating principle, mutualism, is both central to human interaction and necessary to aid human society in meeting the myriad challenges it faces regarding climate change, inequality, governance, education and many other issues.
There are more than 300,000 people who are homeless in the United Kingdom. That’s the figure from Shelter, a nonprofit based in London, England, that provides legal and other support services for the homeless. A new organization called Beam, founded by Alex Stephany, is taking a unique approach to assist the homeless population. The platform features profiles of people — recommended by other charities — who are looking for job training assistance.
Coal generation makes up about a third of the United States’ power supply — a share that has been shrinking thanks to a boom in natural gas, among other factors. As the end of coal looks more and more inevitable, so does the need for “just transitions.” That is, the engineering of fair economic and environmental conditions for communities who have historically relied on fossil fuel extraction.
George Monbiot, a columnist for the British newspaper and website The Guardian, may be the most prominent champion of the commons that I’ve discovered in mainstream journalism today. He has long been a compelling, out-of-the-box thinker on all sorts of economic and environmental issues. Now he is introducing the commons to his large readership and explaining its importance and its historic neglect by economists and politicians. Bravo!
Look out the window, see the air between your eyes and the horizon. This is the Anthropocene – a new geological age characterized by the critical impacts of human activities on the Earth’s systems. Every word you will ever speak will be articulated using this changed air. The Anthropocene can be understood not as an issue but a context: it is the world we do and will, from now on, inhabit…
