Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When Brazilian indigenous leader Sônia Guajajara gave a fiery speech on environmentalism and human rights at the Rock in Rio music festival in September 2017, alongside Alicia Keys, she captured the power and authority of Brazil’s National Indigenous Movement (Mobilização Nacional Indígena, MNI). “This is the mother of all struggles, the struggle for Mother Earth!” exclaimed Sônia to a massive, cheering audience.
Before Irma’s and María’s devastating pit stops in the Archipelago, Puerto Rico was (and still is, even more so now) undergoing one of the most detrimental financial and socio-political crises of its contemporary history. With an unaudited $74 billion debt under its belt, and $49 billion in pension obligations, with decades of illegal bond issuances and trades and an overly-advertised tax haven, Puerto Rico was/is almost literally drowning.
Of course, GPS is a remarkable technological feature. It gets us to a destination without getting lost, without having to wonder where we are. Yet, cocooning ourselves in a cushion of geographical illiteracy also breeds a listless lack of awareness, demanding nothing more from us than an abiding self-interest.
This book is excellent in its forthright account of the way the global economy has been structured by and for Western elites and consumers. It deals with the history of brutal colonial grabbing, the creation of global inequality and the way Neoliberal doctrine enables continued polite plunder today. It disputes the conventional faith that Third World poverty is being eliminated. However I think Hickle’s discussion of alternatives is disappointing, and I want to suggest more effective options.
What has been left to a new generation of younger scholars and activist intellectuals is to trace the contours of the new field we need going forward: a sociology of the climate crisis, and a sociology of climate justice, alongside the movement that bears that name.
When the electricity stops in modern civilization, pretty much everything else stops. Not even gasoline-powered vehicles can get far before they are obliged to seek a fill-up—which they cannot get because gas pumps rely on electricity to operate.
[Jamies’] paper suggested that growing up in poverty can result in decrements in attentional processes, working memory, and a measurably smaller hippocampus. In an exploration as to the reasons why, as a culture, we might be less able to constructively imagine the future, Jamie felt like an important person to talk to.
As a volunteer you were asked to see the hurricane as something that could happen to anyone, could happen to you; to see people you help in life not as victims you’ve saved, but people like you — someone you should care for as you would want others to take care of you.
The reason I am highlighting Puerto Rico is because the situation is so urgent. But also because it’s a microcosm of a much larger global crisis, one that contains many of the same overlapping elements: accelerating climate chaos; militarism; histories of colonialism; a weak and neglected public sphere; a totally dysfunctional democracy; and overlaying it all, the seemingly bottomless capacity to discount the lives of huge numbers of black and brown people.
Tracking forwards now over the later middle ages in Europe, one story to be told is the slow erosion of the peasant autonomy that had characterised the ‘Dark Ages’ – not only by the growing power of local lords, but also of royal houses which increasingly brought aristocrats to heel under the aegis of centralised, proto-modern royal absolutist states.
Obviously, the Puerto Rican people have immediate needs for food, water, fuel, and medical care. We mainland Americans should be doing all we can to make sure that help reaches those in the throes of crisis. But Puerto Ricans—all Americans, indeed all humans—should be thinking longer-term about what kind of society is sustainable and resilient in this time of increasing vulnerability to disasters of all kinds.
Where did things go wrong on the way to modern life, and what should we do instead? This question always seems to lurk in the background of our fascination with many indigenous cultures. The modern world of global commerce, technologies and countless things has not delivered on the leisure and personal satisfaction once promised.
