Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The path of ‘deep adaptation’ to the imminent breakdown and the path to avoid short-term human extinction are one and the same: we need to restore healthy ecosystems functions and we need to redesign the human impact on Earth by engaging in regenerative bioregional development — everywhere!
We face a stark choice between endless austerity, the removal of rights, accelerating inequality, deepening environmental chaos and ever greater power to the few. Or ‘we the people’ seize the opportunity to re-write the rules by which we are governed and ensure that these place the ‘rights of nature’ at its very heart.
These measures of our current situation—this “People’s State of the Nation” as it were—point to where American efforts must be. Even a few minutes with your head bowed over this material—which shows the U.S. woefully behind our peer countries—should convince you that we have let our national situation deteriorate for far too long.
Only in taking responsibility for how our actions leave certain people more vulnerable to premature death than others can we forge climate justice against green nationalism.
The new guard has created an opening for movements on a range of issues to dust off our biggest demands and translate them into a platform that can be stumped on, debated and popularized in the coming years. We are no longer in an era where we have to settle for what the establishment says is winnable.
To stop what the majority of Americans are convinced is a cataclysmic event just waiting to happen, combatants must become colleagues. To paraphrase President Reagan–Republicans and Democrats tear down your walls!
In my view, the most glaring omission in the GND is its lack of any challenge to consumerism and our current obsession with economic growth.
To me one of the most important things is mental sovereignty, is that you really think for yourself rather than be made small, be made constrained, by the narrowness of the dominant culture.
The discourse about Brexit at and around Westminster is thick with either/or thinking. Every action and every person is one thing or another.
The fight we signed up for is now the fight for what’s left and the people who get left with it. That’s all, really. But it’s also everything. And you, my weary friend, will never stop.
To conclude, in most places globally there were the natives and now there are the newcomers. The current migrants into Europe are yet another such wave. No matter one’s ancestral origin, we must all learn to live a deeply natural way. It is the path to authentic hope.
We have this remarkable ability as human beings to conjure things in our imaginations, and design them, when they’re not in evidence in front of us, but we can do that.
