Activism

Truthtelling & activism – Sept 29

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– “How to Boil a Frog” trailer (just out)
– Finding common ground at ASPO-USA’s annual conference
– Lakoff: Notes on Environmental Communication
– It’s time to talk honestly about collapse
– Stories That Light Up The Dark
– Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
– How to start a movement (TED Talk video – NEW)

A threat to burn the Koran and the role of the Transition Movement

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When change unfolds, people want real solutions more than they want to hate. Our work helps people get focused on practical action, brings emotional rewards of connection and common purpose. Transition is an inoculation against human breakdown. It is inoculation against hate.

The Long and the Short of It: Existential Comfort in the Age of Hopkins and Greer, Part III

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There is in Greer no sense that we are a singular people standing at a singular moment where history has opened up to provide us with breath-taking possibilities: “Human societies, like fence lizards, are organic systems, and they respond to changes in their environments in much the same way” (85); “history is an ecological phenomenon, governed by the same laws as other processes in nature” (241). Thus we aren’t going to be confronted with a fork in the road, the road less travelled made famous according to the predominant misinterpretation of the Frost poem, with a moment to act or not, as the opening lines of The Handbook suggests.

Politics in the Great Transition

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Someday there will be thousands of scholarly books on how political systems coped or failed during the transition from fossil fuel-sustained civilizations to that which is to come. For now, however, there are practically none as only a relative handful of the 6.7 billion on earth today have even a glimmer that the great transition is underway.

Pulcinella’s escape

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Pulcinella was the most restless marionette in the old theater. He always had something to protest about. At performance time, he wanted to take a stroll. Or the puppet-master gave him a comic role when he had wanted something more serious.

“One day or another,” he confided to Arlecchino the Harlequin, “I’m going to cut my strings.” And that’s what he did, but it wasn’t during the day. One night he’d gotten a hold of a pair of scissors that the puppet-master had left behind. One after the other, he cut the strings tied to his head, his hands and his feet.

Stories from the mountain-top

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As part of its focus on action in the present–the moment at which oil is peaking–as a time of opportunity for decisive action of historical consequences, the Transition Movement embraces the act of telling stories; stories are a crucial tool for this monumental change–as important, perhaps, as our new-found ability to darn socks and grow Kale. (Part 2 of “Existential Comfort in the Age of Hopkins and Greer”)