Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Our challenge now, in this new century, is this. Nourishing, replenishing, nurturing, renewing, endowing. What? Everything that we can. Everything from basic incomes to to trees to insects to glaciers to hospitals to schools to retirement to mountains and forests. Do you see how the theme of nourishment and replenishment is what flows through all our challenges, like a great laughing river, renewing a parched, weeping ocean?
That’s why, to counter fascist violence, we need to offer a better future, not simply more of the status quo. Confronted with the politics of hate, it’s all the more necessary to set a course on hope.
It is important to make the connection between beauty and nature obvious and to name beauty as the quality in nature we so desire. If we don’t, we continue allegiance to the very paradigm that has been so destructive of the human-nature relations, the paradigm that erased value from the natural world and made beauty nothing more than a subjective opinion.
And yet the climate movement can and must grow stronger. In my view, the movement has yet to develop the full analysis of the problem it hopes to solve, and consequently its full, autonomous identity. I lay out what I believe to be the full analysis in my essay on the next steps of the climate movement, but I’ll recount some main points here.
All around us is Greensong—the sounds, vibrations, smells, and tastes of a living planet. Can you sense it? Are you listening? What does it tell you?
We all need to transform our lifestyles as well.I believe any transformation process will consist of a “patchwork of solutions”; some will evolve in parallel, some mutually enhancing and some may also turn out not to be successful.
Remember in the midst of your neurosis and discouragement as you consider the huge problems we face: training ourselves and the upcoming generations to face life on earth with a cheerful frugality is advancing the revolution in its own slow way.
Alcott puts America under a microscope and pulls us close to see all its refracted contradictions — the staggering beauty and the rapacious violence. Her characters, her Americas, are all lost and damaged and so alive you can hear them breath and seethe between her pages.
We must do all we can to protect the basic environmental conditions that allow humanity to flourish. In this context, Extinction Rebellion’s economic and political program is on the side of reason, and well supported by academic research.
The threat of a pandemic is much greater because we refuse to address the causes of climate change. Yes, in the short term we can take steps to survive an emergency, but in the long term the only way to reduce the threat is to address climate change.
It’s as if, as environmental humanities scholar Anthony Galluzzo posted recently, humanity, not tech is—ha—the engine of history. Again, it’ll be people, not science alone, environmental scientist Erle Ellis wrote in another Times op-ed, who’ll save us from ecological collapse.
let’s fight for what’s right not because we will win (and we’ll want to) but because it’s just what we do. Let us let this be okay. I am not hopeless. I am only without the hopes I had.
