Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So, back to the main thread of my story: in weighing up capitalism’s historical record, it’s also necessary to reckon with the fact that capitalism has never confined itself to single national economies.
The Standing Rock standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline was a reminder that colonization, and resistance to it, both exist in the present tense. Fossil fuel pipelines that despoil indigenous lands and waters have become key flashpoints in long-standing anti-colonial resistance. An important precursor and inspiration for the Standing Rock camp is an indigenous occupation in northern British Columbia, Canada.
We are currently facing the most severe migration crisis in history. But this is only one dimension of a broader civilizational crisis. Thus, anti-racist movements should not focus solely on issues of human mobility rights, but also build new paths of solidarity with societies in the geopolitical Global South.
Our world is experiencing a dark wood that appears to stretch to the horizon and beyond. A dark wood in which there are no maps, because we have created a forest empty of the stories that connect us back to our deeper soul, to our natural ground, to our understanding that we are all connected. When we lose our stories we lose this common ground, that which holds us and grounds us in a sense of the whole.
The stories that fill this extraordinary volume depict a far-future world that defies most people’s expectations about the future. In it, America and the other developed nations have reverted to a preindustrial state of existence as a consequence of having exhausted the Earth’s economically recoverable fossil fuels as well as rendered immense regions of the planet humanly uninhabitable in the process.
To be as clear about this as I can, I am still hoping for a sort of drastic cultural change, a new way of seeing and believing, a new paradigm, a reorientation of wants and expectations, dreams and desires—and all the more so for abandoning some of the pragmatic and logistical aspirations that initially led the way in many a Transition imagination. In other words, I’m rather simply asking this: what if we focus mainly, now, on all the inner change that has happened along the road to Totnes?
Can virtual worlds transform the world we live in? That question isn’t just something high school kids ask — it’s a question that professionals across industries are actively asking today. In her TED talk, game designer Karoliina Korppoo explains how player-generated virtual cities could shape the cities we live and work in. Korppoo is the lead designer of the game Cities: Skylines by Finnish game studio Colossal Order, which is designed to provide a realistic urban planning experience for players.
It has become something of a mantra within the sustainability movement that innovations in technology will save the world and all of us in it, but we tend to forget that technology played a big part in getting ourselves into this mess in the first place. In a manifesto released back in August, author Richard Heinberg, who is also the Senior Fellow-in-Residence of the US-Based Post Carbon Institute, explains why technology, which is widely heralded as our saviour, is not the secret sauce to solve all our environmental troubles.
Building community resilience starts with the courage to collaborate with the people around you to protect the things about your community that you value most. We hope The Community Resilience Reader helps support you and your community in shaping a future that is rewarding for everyone.
Humans aren’t made to process an unlimited amount of trauma. In fact, we’re wired to protect ourselves against it. Smith tells me that seeing so much destruction and feeling incapable of doing anything leads to a kind of moral distress.
The stage is now set for the next scene in our whistle-stop tour – the emergence of capitalism. But first a quick aside. Enmeshed in a contemporary global capitalist economy as we are, it’s easy to read it back into history as some kind of inevitable culmination of past processes. But there’s no reason to think that our present was foreordained.
Playing for Team Human today is Post Carbon Institute fellow Richard Heinberg. Richard is the co-author of Our Renewable Future and most recently, the manifesto, There’s No App For That. On today’s show Richard and Douglas challenge the idea that technological “progress” is a panacea for solving systems-level crises like climate change.
