Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Strategic climate communicators still don’t know what will be successful. The extent of our failure is of Biblical proportions and continuing. In the meantime, everyone should do everything, all the time, even if it means finding motivation by thinking about an uninhabitable world.
Can you feel capitalism dying around you? There is a mental disease of late-stage capitalism causing deep worry and anxiety, prompting feelings of severe isolation and humiliation, combined with a profound sense of powerlessness for millions of people around the world. The question I ask today is What are YOU going to do about it?
I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr’s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. I found, however, that a longer “essay” was what I felt called to write. Orr’s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century.
What I find interesting—and infuriating—about a self-proclaimed “global media” and its storytelling about Indian eco-awakening is a myopic diagnosis of and solution to global environmental crisis, aka climate change, through a perception of time seeped in historic amnesia.
It’s true: apocalyptic warnings don’t move most people. Or, rather, they move most people away from the source of discomfort, so they simply tune out. But it’s also true that people feel a sense of deep, unacknowledged unease when they are fed “solutions” that they instinctively know are false or insufficient.
In this episode we spoke with Rob Hopkins, the founder and figurehead of the Transition Movement, which is a grassroots community project aiming to increase self-sufficiency and address the ecological and economic crises currently faced by humanity.
The World Happiness Report puts Danes consistently in the top tier. Twice in the past four years Denmark came in first. Danes also report more satisfaction with their health care than anyone else in Europe, which makes sense, since happiness is related to a sense of security and others being there for you. A fine health care system makes that real.
Key to the conceptual confidence trick are assumptions about what people in general are like. It is all based on an implicit modelling of human beings. Certain types of behaviour (the type that allows economists to model people and markets) are called “rational”.
Obviously, the main priority for each of these three communities is not cultivating land but creating connections among the people cultivating it. The goal is to strengthen the community and the land provides a way to achieve it. That’s something we can all relate to, can’t we?
I don’t know who will turn a profit first, Stephen or I, but we’ll both keep putting in the labour. It’s what we do, bounty or not. Is he a farmer? Of course. Am I a writer? – I don’t know why that answer comes with more difficulty. But I look to the land, to my generation with its multi-year commitments: development, sustainability, security. To their faith in place. I have faith, too. I am a writer. And I keep farming.
Humans are motivated by love, belonging, meaning, and mattering. People love good stories—even ones (or especially one) that have shame, fear, guilt, and anxiety. To understand such stories, one has to have a conscience and care about the world. There’s no need to sugarcoat the situation we’re in; let’s put a rest to that argument. What we need is heaps of fierce compassion and bravery.
“The grass was tall, and the house was in bad shape,” Alan remembers. But somehow it became home — the couple raised four children there. And they wound up restoring not just the once-vacant house, but the downtown community around it, as well.
