Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While politicians fiddle, citizens are again being left to suffer–perhaps none more than the nearly 23,000 coal miners in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and elsewhere, facing the loss of healthcare benefits.
It can’t be like “We need a policy for a rewilded childhood”, because we could be waiting forever, and that ain’t going to happen. And we haven’t got time to wait forever I don’t believe. So it’s what do we all do to rewild our own family, our own community, our own school?
Maintaining a civilization is always a delicate balancing act that is sooner or later destined to fail.
The story I am to tell you in this book is a story about a community that became isolated on a small island in the wake of industrial civilisation’s collapse, during the third decade of the twenty-first century. Those who grew up on the Isle, as I did, sometimes liked to jest that we were the descendents of Plato’s banished poets, but the reality is that our humble story is considerably less romantic, with more grit and tears than any fairy tale could ever allow.
We can boil at the inequities and destructiveness of the current system. There are times and places that are appropriate for that. But our best chance to traverse the the path to a more decentralized world while minimizing harm and maximizing success is to begin building it.
There will be light posting from 20th April to 5th May due to editorial vacations. Regular posting will resume on 8th May. Teaser photo credit: By ClemRutter, Rochester, Kent. – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2163988
For the ecomodernists, the world presents itself predominantly as a set of technical challenges – how to feed the world, how to power it, and so forth. The mood is optimism, the modus operandi is solutionism.
How does resource sharing affect biodiversity? How does knowledge exchange drive community resilience? How is information access—delivered via technologies—an equalizer among the underrepresented, marginalized, and oppressed? How does our ability to feed a growing planet depend on a culture of openness?
The climate crisis presents a challenge that justifies a vast mobilization of the public as much as the Great Depression did. One means of doing this would be to form a National Community Resilience Corps (NCRC), which would harness the untapped passion, creativity, and labor of millions of young people to implement projects to grow resilience and build sustainability in tens of thousands of communities across the country.
What is concerning is that it is ever more apparent that many of our civilization’s structural systems, many of which resemble the pyramid archetype, seem more and more dysfunctional or “captured”.
As we detach from the conversations that since forever formed the bedrock of our culture, we imagine that the ability to be always connected will make us less lonely. And yet loneliness is a national epidemic.
I’m happy to continue to have conversations about the parenthood decision and ‘otherness’ and to offer spaces for others to meet, because it strikes me that these conversations are at the heart of the sort of resilience we need and are increasingly likely to need in the coming decades – and because it’s the least I can do for the biosphere.
