Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Thoughts on the relationship between food issues, rural movements, and Climate Camps. To be more specific: this post mainly compares the distinct focuses and limitations of the Diggers’ movement toward agricultural autonomy, and the Climate Campers’ rallies and interventions against coal plants, airport expansion projects, and other commercially-driven operations.
A few months ago, I had an email exchange with Bill McKibben about the commonly perceived but, we both agreed, false distinction between lifestyle changes and political acts. Those of you who have read _Depletion and Abundance_ know that I spend a good bit of time on just this subject – on the idea that our ordinary daily activities are not political acts, or that we can resolve our problems in a way that isn’t whole, that doesn’t include our personal way of life *along* with our political and community activism.
The troubled future of industrial society has become tangled up in our collective imagination with a dizzying array of hopes and fears. Will the end of our age bring more meaningful and fulfilling lives to the survivors, as some people insist nowadays, or have daydreams of destruction become an inkblot onto which too many people project fantasies of redemption?
-Protesters March on Washington
-U.S. consumers cut debt by record $21.6 billion in July
-How the World’s Biggest Corporations, From Starbucks to Wal-Mart to Barnes & Noble, Claim to Be ‘Local’
The recent debate in print between Paul Kingsnorth and George Monbiot on the possibility of saving industrial civilization from itself never quite got past some very problematic core assumptions. The Archdruid offers a third opinion on the subject.
-The Transition Towns Movement; its huge significance and a friendly criticism
-Responding to Ted Trainer’s Friendly Criticism of Transition
A common refrain today is how ‘the government’ needs to do something; the openly voiced belief that those in authority hold all the power, while the ‘common folk’ are merely cogs who have no strength to change anything…It is the power of people – not ‘the’ people, merely people in general, as a whole, who are willing to stand up in defiance of this short-sighted and greedy behavior. It is their courage in the face of an oppressive, world-straddling civilization, one built upon exploiting the poorest to benefit the richest, that now stands as the battlefield in the age-old struggle between the kingmakers and the common folk.
-A strategic blunder in the North-West Frontier Province
-U.S. Military Says Its Force in Afghanistan Is Insufficient
-Tensions Rise in Post-Election Afghanistan
-Is Pakistan’s Taliban movement on the way out?
-Iran Gas Ban: Step toward War with Iran?
-How Crime Pays for the Taliban
If we are to work on a community level, we’re going to have to use the old community and neighborhood organizing strategies, rather than a series of showings of End of Suburbia or How to Boil a Frog (don’t get me wrong, I really think very highly of these movies). That is, that we are going to have to be able to enlist people at very low levels of commonality, rather than at high levels of education about the future of the world if we’re to get enough bodies on the ground to do what is needed. And that these communities need to be built, well, yesterday.
Authenticity comes when your thoughts, your words, and your deeds have some relation to each other. It comes when there’s a real organic relationship between the way you think, the way you talk, and the way you act. You have to fight for authenticity all the time in this world, and if you don’t fight for it you will get derailed. But when you have it, when you feel that surge of recognition—that I’m saying exactly what I’m thinking, and I’m ready to do something about it—well, that’s an intellectual and emotional orgasm that makes sex look like nothing.
Forget Shorter Showers
Peak Jubilee
Consciousness and Complexity
While living modestly, these peoples’ lives were filled with sumptuous dreams they worked to transform into reality. While they certainly suffered from bouts of frustration and dismay over the years, none of these greats surrendered to what we call today ‘political burn-out’—or worse, just plain jadedness. … If environmental activists evaluate their work in terms of immediate efficacy and pragmatic ‘do-ableness’, they often collapse after five to ten years (sometimes far less) under the weight of abject disappointment. They resent themselves, their movements, and the world, for not changing fast enough.
