Be a gardener
Being alive to the real world around us, seeing the love and the connection and the magic, is all we need in life, it is all we want. It is the meaning of life.
Society
Familiarizing Degrowth: Art and Grounded Communities
At the heart of everything this is what a strong social movement needs: people coming together to form meaningful and lasting friendships with a shared passion for system change and a willingness to push for that change.
One hope, heroism and denial
Heroism and hope in these times are only possible against a backdrop of total relinquishment to the possibility that we won’t be able to control our own fate. But on a deeper level, this will be the way for us to reconnect with our origins, to become one again with the natural world.
“Better” AI has more “hallucinations”
As AI is “improved,” it has more “hallucinations.” When will the public and investors realize that reliability will always be a problem when there is no judgement based on lived experience?
Ishmael: Chapter 13
Modernity’s inevitable failure need not be humanity’s ultimate failure. Modernity never could have worked in the long term, and represents only a small sliver of human existence.
Crazy Town 103: It Was Never Your Democracy Anyway: Thomas Linzey on Rethinking the Constitution
Democracy and environmental protection have two things in common: (1) they’re both supposed to be enshrined in the laws of the United States and (2) they’re both under severe attack right now. Asher speaks with Thomas Linzey of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights to uncover how the source code of the U.S. Constitution and the body of environmental laws that follow it are actually designed to allow corporations to override the will of the people.
Ishmael: Chapter 12
Only by belonging to the world and living in the hands of the gods did we get to be humans.
Trump’s Tariffs = Localist Liberation?
So, yes, we need to condemn globalization loud and clear. And we need a cohesive strategy that moves us sensibly and sanely in the opposite direction.
Ishmael: Chapter 11
Asked if he could fathom trading modern life for a pre-agricultural lifestyle, Alan admits that he cannot. Meanwhile, Leavers exposed to modernity have consistently tried to return to their Leaver lifestyles—often rendered impossible by the destructive acts of Takers.
Open Reality: Meeting the Polycrisis Together With All Beings
If you close your eyes, you can feel the energy of land and creek, rocks and bluffs, grasses and red cedar trees, blue sky and snow, all of it together.
Autonomy for the Majority of the World! Community Struggles for Self-Governance in the Global South
In many ways, then, the real challenge in times of ecological collapse, the rise of authoritarian governments, capitalist crisis, and war-mongering militarization is to truly understand these systems, their evolving nature in relation to contemporary societies, their potential interface with modern institutions of governance, and how to strengthen overall governance for the purposes of justice and sustainability.
Ishmael: Chapter 10
Ishmael asks Alan to define culture, working out in steps that culture is the accumulated knowledge that defines a people, passed down to—and refined/amended by—future generations. This transmission goes beyond mere information, encompassing “beliefs, assumptions, theories, customs, legends, songs, stories, dances, jokes, superstitions, prejudices, tastes, attitudes.”
