Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Nonviolent campaigns are often dramatic and catch the attention of millions—think of Standing Rock water protectors resolute in the face of a brutal police force. All the more puzzling that the concept of a “nonviolent campaign” is little known and often ignored when people talk about how to mobilize power, for example, to prevent Donald Trump from erasing gains made in addressing climate change.
I said I’d swear off blogging for a month, but I thought I’d just drop by to note the appearance on the Dark Mountain Blog of my review of 2016, called ‘A sheep’s vigil’. And, since I’m here, I might as wIell sketch a little bit of extra context for that piece.
The world – and chiefly among it, first world countries – seems to me, to be moving away from a purely industrial model, aimed mainly at production, to a new type of society whose contours and goals have yet to be clearly defined.”
The island state of Dominica (absolutely NOT the Dominican Republic!) is unique, constantly confounding my expectations. It is a tropical Caribbean island, but not a typical Caribbean island. It is hot and wet, mountainous, with small rocky beaches, few tourists, and a fiercely independent spirit in a part of the world dominated by their powerful neighbour to the North. I was invited by WEF, the Waitukubuli Ecological Foundation, to visit and help them explore Transition as a possible way for this island.
So much has been written already about Donald Trump, the election of 2016, and the horrors that surely lie ahead of us, that it is impossible to single out just one piece to focus hearts and minds. Therefore, taking the long view – and why not? Heaven help us if it’s a day more than four years – here is some of the deep background that you might want to explore on those long winter nights that try our souls.
The Leap is a manifesto that aspires to spark and inform a movement. I was one of hundreds who attended a meeting where it was presented to a global audience at COP 21 in Paris in December of 2015. There was real enthusiasm in a room of intergenerationals, much of it for a chance to hear Klein and her husband Avi Lewis, whose film based on the book, and is also titled This Changes Everything, had just been released.
Many of the violent conflicts raging today can only be understood if we look at the interplay between climate change, the shrinking of cheap energy supplies, and a dominant economic model that refuses to acknowledge physical limits.
A vast and growing body of scientific literature is impressing upon us that human economic activity is degrading planetary ecosystems in ways that are unsustainable. Taken as a whole, we are overconsuming Earth’s resources, destabilising the climate, and decimating biodiversity…
There is no doubt that as a species we have to downsize if we are to respect the limits; not only for ourselves but —just as importantly— for the millions of other species that co-inhabit the earth with us. It is timely, therefore, to talk of degrowth in the context of humanity as a whole, and most certainly in the context of the Global North which is overconsuming and overdumping.
One of the most powerful antidotes we have to despair – whether in the face of the climate catastrophe that looms menacingly on the horizon, or of the dawn of the Trump era in the United States – is our ability to resist and create, often simultaneously, through our cultural creation – our art, cultures, literature, movies, and music.
I’ve never been enthusiastic about reducing my carbon footprint or energy consumption. It would have real effects, I know, and you can make extreme reductions, as the Riot 4 Austerity folks and others have demonstrated. But I can’t help saying to myself, “Unless everybody does it, the effects are marginal.”
Humans are symbolic creatures. We look for the signs in passing details that make sense of larger patterns – news stories, politics, natural events stitched into the narrative of our lives by small, local things. And always, perhaps, a reading of the portents for a prickling sense of threat, dulled but not dismissed by the comfort of the modern.
