Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We are now challenged to fundamentally redesign the human presence and impact on Earth to shift from a mainly exploitative, destructive and degenerative impact to becoming co-creative collaborators with the wider community of life in the healing of our ecosystems and the regeneration of the Earth and our communities. Life itself is a regenerative community!
I loved the book’s assertion that “unless progressives acknowledge and accept a politics of imagination, desire and spectacle, and, most important, make it ethical and make it our own, we will bring about our “ruin rather than preservation”.
Despite their valiant efforts, Barrett contends that organizers today have yet to secure the “wide-reaching, concrete accomplishments of earlier movements.” In this interview, he expands on why this is the case, what particular campaigns have done to win meaningful victories in recent years, and where he sees glimmers of hope today.
Stopping the destructive effects of industrial, capitalist civilization has now become the defining challenge of our age. If successful grassroots struggles can be linked with equally hopeful movements for real political change, then there is hope for the future.
How to scale up and extend practices of radical democracy beyond specific urban locations is a key question. In the age of instant horizontal communication, it ought to be easier to resolve this question.
If climate change is anything, it must be the greatest failure of the imagination in the history of the world. Perhaps K’s paper might offer some illumination as to why our response isn’t happening fast enough?
Understanding climate anxiety, and how to incorporate psychology into our plans for tackling climate change is growing, but only slowly.
Protecting the children is a formidable responsibility. But it is our responsibility, and we bring to the task a formidable set of powers, honed, sharpened, and passed down mother-to-daughter over generations.
‘New Thinking for the British Economy’ – a new eBook published today by openDemocracy – brings together leading thinkers to outline the broad pillars of a new post-neoliberal agenda, and the type of policies that are needed to get us there.
In our view, at some point scientists and policy makers must begin discussing the one scenario that world leaders seem to want to avoid at all costs, i.e., managed economic contraction. The irony is that this scenario could reliably cut greenhouse gas emissions and is achievable without appeal to magic (CCS or decoupling).
Heroes don’t blame others when calamity strikes; victims don’t manage to find a way out of their vulnerability. Those who suffer unnatural disasters do both, as required, and that is the way the world will heal.
In the case of ‘storytelling’, the central issue is an assumption that what is needed to solve our social problems and change the public’s mind is a ‘method’ – that we have all the materials that we need, and all that’s needed to present alternative ideas is a better way of conveying them.
