Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Lakota youth pipeline fighter and climate justice advocate Tokata Iron Eyes stars in “My Name Is Future,” a new independent feature documentary that fuses her worldview with the art of Los Angeles-based activist Andrea Bowers.
In this episode of “Podcast from the Prairie,” Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen discuss the creativity of both humans and the larger living world.
For a book that can be breezed through in a couple of hours, this pseudonymously written novella manages to plumb the modern-day human dilemma with surprising depth and emotion.
As of right now, climate justice does not have a unified definition. Its meaning changes depending on who is using it so let me make my vision very clear. Climate justice is collective liberation by another name.
From the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to the oil fields of Texas, to the Ecuadorian Amazon, The Condor & the Eagle tells the story of the collective struggle of the Indigenous peoples of North and South America in their fight to preserve their communities and to protect the Earth from climate change.
According to Cantadora and Wise Woman, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Descansos are symbols that mark a death: as an example, a cross by the wayside with the name of the person who died spelled out in nails. Can we create Descansos for our dying civilization? For die it must if we are to live. Let these words be my Descansos offered in gratitude to She Who Loves Us All.
Now that we’ve patted ourselves down to check for wounds to our wallets or cupboards or health, I challenge us to plant the question in our hearts – who isn’t safe, needs support, needs allies – and see what grows.
Who will you be on the other side of this?
What we know and what we have good grounds to fear about climate change calls our way of living into question. To take this evidence seriously leads to difficult questions about the stories we have been telling about the shape of history, the nature of the world in which we find ourselves and the virtue of achievements in which we have taken pride.
Artists are enlisted to help ‘deliver the message’ and ‘raise awareness’, as though art were a sophisticated extension of the PR department or a cheap alternative to an advertising agency. This is not only a misconception of what art is and what it’s good at, it’s also a misconception of the knowledge work that remains, when the scientists reach the end of their road.
There are many proposals for radical economies from progressive economists, activists and think tanks. Artists are increasingly joining these debates with speculative proposals and unconventional methodologies.
The Arts, Culture and Commoning working group is interested in using commons-based approaches “to transform the landscape of arts and culture toward equity, abundance, and interdependence as part of a social movement engaged in and in conversation with this urgent moment. Cooperation, collaboration, mutuality, and co-creation bring us together.”
I believe the portal to this new way lies partly in our DNA. On a cellular level, we all hold memories of living in harmony with the natural world. We can activate these memories in many ways: through our imaginations; through time spent quietly in wild places; through the study of ancient, land-based wisdom; through wholehearted, community-driven, research-based exploration rooted in respect for the living world.
