Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I have become more certain that the way through despair involves experiencing oneself as part of a greater whole and surrendering to the mystery of creation. But now the climate crisis invites us to engage with the mystery of life with fresh eyes and open hearts.
Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement last month that a Labour government would replace social mobility with social justice as a policy benchmark raised more than a few eyebrows. It goes against received wisdom and bipartisan consensus that social mobility is a good thing.
If we are to scale this challenge, we need the legitimacy conferred by a responsive democracy. More democracy, not less. Enter the citizens assembly.
We can only successfully overcome the crises triggered by extractivism if the voices that have been marginalized up until now, especially those of women, claim a space in the center of the process of change.
We face a “perfect storm” of interacting global stressors. Is resilience a possible response? What does real resilience look like? Join some of the foremost thinkers in a discussion on resilience and civilizational collapse.
What would it take to update what the Folk High School did for the Nordic countries and make it accessible globally to the emerging youth movement and to everyone interested in activating such a deep learning cycle?
I share Bill McKibben’s sentiments 100%. I have worked in the climate trenches for twenty years, and I have always said that if you think you understand the climate crisis and you haven’t yet had that awful sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, you haven’t understood the climate crisis.
Let’s put our hands in the earth and our shoulders to the wheel. Let’s live up to the standards we set for each other and forgive one another when we fail. Let’s cultivate new relationships with one another and the land that honor the dignity of both. Let’s take it easy, but take it.
The desire to build a better society within Earth’s boundaries is reshaping politics. As different constituencies align and start pulling together, we can start to tell new stories about the future.
I am steadily on the lookout for leveraging forces that can lift us out of heavy stuck loops, onto new ground. Often these are less obvious elements. One that has been underestimated is the presence of “elders,” whose presence calls us back to a bedrock sense of self and right relationship to the Earth.
We must use this moment as crucial leverage to push the planet in a new direction. Let us try. If we succeed, then we have risen to the greatest crisis humans have ever faced and shown that the big brain was a useful evolutionary adaptation. If we fail—well, we better to go down trying.
But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’. It is bound up, intimately, with a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism. And it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.
