Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The household is oriented to meeting its own socially defined needs. There is no inherent tendency to the amplification of production or the accumulation of wealth.
We have available a wide variety of strategies that can help societies ask, answer, and act on the questions, “What is enough?” “What is too much?” and “How can we keep the Earth livable and achieve sufficiency for all?”
The great challenge is not to deny this fear, but to take responsibility and overcome it, avoiding paralysis and nihilistic or cynical attitudes. In other words, converting fear into preventive and effective action, into awareness of all species.
Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, laments the Rocket Man in Elton John’s timeless classic. In fact, it’s cold as hell. But that doesn’t seem to worry a new generation of space entrepreneurs intent on colonising the “final frontier” as fast as possible.
If I accept the seriousness of our predicament the question becomes, to use a familiar phrase, “How then shall we live?” What can people who care about life on Earth do to help at this point?
What a marvellous book! A powerful refutation of one of the most deeply entrenched and mistaken assumptions built into our taken-for-granted world view, and thus leading to many wrong-headed practices.
At this time everyone, as parts of the human systems constituted by communities, polities and humanity as a whole, must consciously, collectively and urgently strive to realize the ecological civilization.
In order to close the circle, the commons must be that which helps to provide the minimum subsistence that guarantees a decent quality of life.
To what extent does the peasant way inherently impose certain kinds of social structure, to what extent can we now exercise different choices over those structures, and how might peasant societies of the future differ from or resemble ones of the past?
This points to the most important characteristic of the future: it is something that we are all co-creating as part of the interconnected web of our collective thoughts, ideas, and actions.
Human ecology opens us beyond a reductive view. We are part of understanding; our regard is from ‘inside,’ not as ‘outside’ observers.
