Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
There’s a bridge between people’s experiences with these more-than-human “living cultures” and the work of regrowing our ways of being human together. They offer images that reflect, backwards and forwards, helping us give words to the work that is called for.
The value of the arts is as a natural, communal expression of meaning that is inseparable from our everyday lives, impulses and needs, existing in spite of the desires of capitalism and the hegemonic structures that enforce it.
Humans can slow and, perhaps, reverse the ecological harms that they have caused, but Earth will never return to some past pristine state. Nonetheless, I believe that history can help humans save Earth’s remaining wild, natural places that, along with cultural icons like Notre Dame, tell the stories of who we are.
An advantage of the transition to agrarian localism is that it depends very little on new technologies, and almost entirely on politics – hence my subtitle for this post.
It is a matter of summoning our collective will to build a future based on the common good, and the people with whom we can best do it are our neighbors in our communities and bioregions. We can change the world by beginning the work in our own places.
Journalist and podcaster Rachel Donald (Planet: Critical) interviews Dr. Omnia El Omrani, a medical doctor and Climate and Health Policy Fellow at Imperial College London. Omnia shares reflections on Connecting Climate Minds—a landmark project looking at climate and mental health across the globe, with a specific focus on the lived experiences of youth, Indigenous communities, small farmers and fisher people.
If transportation departments and urban planning staff do not include the voices of nondrivers, they are unlikely to develop policies and infrastructure that will reflect the needs of their whole communities.
Biospheric cognition, when brightly lit, always places the biosphere first and central. Always. Biospheric cognition is a context in which understanding and meaning take place as the very biosphere itself (Herself) cognizing with and through us, awake or awakening to itself/Herself as us.
There may be no way to explain how you feel because nobody can inhabit your body with you, and for all the skills of a poet, the mirrored and empty wastelands of fear are a terribly lonely place. We are invisible there, and not being able to find the words makes us feel invisible here.
Once we break out of the myth that our minds are separate from our bodies, it becomes apparent that we are the same as all other living beings. We are not special, and therefore do not warrant having mastery over other species or over ‘creation.’
The obvious question, then, is what scale of human activity is Earth capable of supporting? Nobody knows. The best we can do is accept the ride down, in a spirit of humility, finding joy in something other than technology and modernity. Since we were able to do just that for 95% of Homo sapiens’ time on the planet, I think we’ve got the constitution to do so again.
The epidemic of loneliness isn’t just a product of technology or even capitalism — it has its roots in the same fertile ground as the founding of the United States. And it may just be the most important “ism” of all to escape as we enter the Great Unraveling of social and environmental systems.
