Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Inspired by indigenous cosmologies and customary laws – which are derived from the laws of Nature – Earth Jurisprudence recognises that Nature’s laws are primary and non-negotiable and that humans are interdependent with all other life forms and accountable to the wider Earth community.
For much of human history, people viewed themselves as members of tribes or nations but had no notion of “race.” Today, science deems race biologically meaningless. Who invented race as we know it, and why?
Permaculture — a fusion of indigenous knowledge with modern science and technology — offers ways for people to meet their essential needs for food, water, sanitation and other non-material needs, with autonomy and harmony with nature.
Established power in this country is surrounded by a series of defensive rings. As soon as you begin to name them, you see that the UK is a democracy only in the weakest and shallowest sense.
After the random normlessness of this pandemic, I don’t want to go back to normal either. Or its idiotic child, “the new normal.” Sharon Wilson says we can leave normal for better this way: “Do all things with love, and be damn fierce about it.”
Amen to that.
We should know better, and do better. For those of us who are white in America, that includes grappling with our own identity—particularly the fact that white privilege is as much a part of the scaffolding of our society as fossil fuels, environmental destruction, and unsustainable consumption and growth.
So let’s walk our way out of this pandemic. Walk our way to mental, emotional and physical health. Walk our way back to social
cohesion. Walk our way back to a functional society where anger and suspicion aren’t the normal ways we interact with each other.
In its popular adoption, Transcendentalism would also sew together a natural consensus in which it is consciously and explicitly acknowledged that devotion to the status quo of politics, commercialism, and dogmatic religion leaves out much that is desirable and preferable.
Each day now feels like a decisive day in the decade of decision that we have the fate to be alive in. Speeding up the pace at which we slow down. Slowing down the pace of destruction. Speeding up the pace of creation. Slowing down the machines. Speeding up our imaginations, going deeper in our dreams, and walking further, together, asking questions about the future we want. Right now.
One of the aims of this essay has been to gather some of the ideas that are lying around and help fashion them into a vaguely coherent vision – or multiple visions – of the kinds of worlds we can and might want to live in.
Access to education is a basic human right, yet across the world, girls continue to face multiple barriers based on their gender and its intersections with other factors such as age, ethnicity, poverty and disability. However research shows that for each intake of students, educating girls has multiple benefits that go far beyond the individual and any particular society.
Animism, the enactment and culture of interspecies reciprocity, cannot teach us how to better manage “natural objects”, but shows how to sustain a cosmos giving life to all its members. This will require us to rethink traditional sustainable practices.
