Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Abigail Borah, a Middlebury College student and climate activist from the United States, was ejected from a plenary session at the COP17 climate summit this morning after interrupting introductory remarks by US chief negotiator, Todd Stern. Her statement was met with loud applause from the crowd. Stern later shifted his position — or at least his language — on a timetable for a new set of international talks.
– The Future of the Occupy Movement
– With support among police quietly growing, can Occupy cross over the thin blue line?
– Ron Paul Defends The 99 Percent: ‘It’s A Very Healthy Movement’
– Why Occupy Protesters Marched from Wall Street to DC
– Annie Appel’s Photography of Occupy Los Angeles
– Occupy the Kremlin: Russia’s Election Lets Loose Public Rage
But it is one thing voicing a spiritual idea and another undergoing it in the real world. One thing to breezily state: well hey, we’ll just go into our cocoon and dissolve!, and another actually allowing those old caterpillar forms to break down, uncomfortably, inside ourselves and our social groups, to forge alliances without allowing our own allegiance to the ancien regime to destroy us from within.
The most important piece of news yesterday, this week, this month, and this year was a new set of statistics released yesterday by the Global Carbon Project. It showed that carbon emissions from our planet had increased 5.9 percent between 2009 and 2010. In fact, it was arguably among the most important pieces of data in the last, oh, three centuries, since according to the New York Times it represented “almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution.”
Monstrous as the consumer economy has become, consumer spending is not the biggest environmental problem. Most waste and pollution is caused by industrial, military and commercial processes, over which consumers have no control.
The first round of the social justice movements took multiple forms across the world – the so-called Arab Spring, the Occupy movements beginning in the United States and then spreading to a large number of countries, Oxi in Greece and the indignados in Spain, the student protests in Chile, and many others.
The degree of success may be measured by an extraordinary article by Lawrence Summers – remarkable, considering that he has been personally one of the architects of the world economic policy in the last twenty years that has put us all in the dire crisis in which the world finds itself.
Released in 2011, with an introduction that references this year’s dramatic Tahrir Square and Wisconsin protests, Starhawk appears to have anticipated the broad and unabashed presence of public group processing endeavors in the social movements shaking up the “world order” today.
For money, he does restaurant work, but his passion is photography. He travels by mass transit to Occupy events in the San Francisco Bay Area, documenting them with gorgeous art photos.
– The Atlantic: A Conversation With Rob Hopkins, Transition Movement Founder
– Mark Bittman: Making Local Food Real
– Crowdshare and other events: How to share
– U.N. Envoy: U.S. Isn’t Protecting Occupy Protesters’ Rights
– Occupy’s new grammar of political disobedience
– Hard Times at Occupy Boston
– Thousands rally in Durban for climate action (BBC video)
– Dateline: Tahrir Square
– Letter from Cairo: the liberals, the Brothers, and the poor (some lessons for Occupy)
