The Surrounding Fields
Honestly, ideas about how people ought to interact with nature should not be avant-garde and surprising, because nature itself, in every time and place, ultimately dictates what will work over the long term.
Honestly, ideas about how people ought to interact with nature should not be avant-garde and surprising, because nature itself, in every time and place, ultimately dictates what will work over the long term.
Costa Rica’s culture encourages the treatment of the environment as a top priority. Already, it has managed to achieve the highest combined life expectancy and life satisfaction relative to ecological footprint in an international ranking.
The way forward for any climate defense plan—moderate or progressive—is going to be cluttered with the refuse of the Trump administration, e.g., rolled back regulations, extant lawsuits, the lost government offices and programs needed to implement a pro-environment agenda.
We can do better. So much better. These times call for creativity and imagination in our lifepaths. Humour and magic in our days. Something far more compelling than the mainstream.
Desertification has been described as the “the greatest environmental challenge of our time” and climate change is making it worse.
Our challenge now, in this new century, is this. Nourishing, replenishing, nurturing, renewing, endowing. What? Everything that we can. Everything from basic incomes to to trees to insects to glaciers to hospitals to schools to retirement to mountains and forests. Do you see how the theme of nourishment and replenishment is what flows through all our challenges, like a great laughing river, renewing a parched, weeping ocean?
The intention of the event was to activate the system we are all part of, find common ground and common intention in our work. Academia, Institutions, Government and Civil society looked deeply into ‘what their work is’ and re-assessed the fact that we play on the same side.
Countries under the leadership of populists, e.g., the US, Italy, Poland, and Brazil, are likely to follow Trump’s lead and go their own way—which is away from any commitments their predecessors may have made.
“A great challenge of today,” the late Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess wrote, “is to save the planet from further devastation that violates both the enlightened self-interest of humans and non-humans, and decreases the potential of joyful existence for all.”
The royal, prophetic, and apocalyptic traditions in the Hebrew and Christian bibles provide a compelling framework for understanding progressive intellectual and political work today, as we face the task not only of struggling to create a just and sustainable world but also imagining a saving remnant that will negotiate a radically different future in which both new and old skills, stories, and spaces will be necessary.
In the basic conception of the Anthropocene, there are two actors: mankind and the environment. This sweeping and seemingly compelling divide at once highlights the separation of the two categories and collapses it: if humans are geologic force, we can no longer imagine ourselves outside of nature.
The debate about global poverty is important. But our collective understanding of this matter will only be served by intellectually honest and sincere engagement with the arguments at hand.