Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Given the unfolding tragedy, a moratorium on climate change research is the only responsible option for revealing and then restoring the broken science-society contract.
How can one celebrate heroic individualism in response to a film that shows how stupid that is (in the first comet deflection attempt) and how deadly it can be (in the abortion of that attempt to allow an entrepreneur’s greedy dream of risking the human race to mine the asteroid)?
We must adapt to climate changes in future, and we are adapting already. But if the adaptations are merely ad hoc and not thoughtfully considered, they are more likely to be maladaptations than great adaptations.
Progress is entirely incommensurable with precaution, with a ‘No’ to recklessness. It’s time to say enough to progress and begin to reorient our political narratives around a precautionary logic.
In other words, data is no substitute for knowledge or wisdom. And knowledge and wisdom seem to be the scarcest of resources in modern Canada.
Ending the extraction of fossil fuels from the Earth while achieving material sufficiency, equity and justice would move us a long way toward the more livable future that the people who gathered outside COP26 — along with billions of others around the world — are demanding and are standing ready to create.
We need to move from civil disobedience to political disobedience.
We need to move from captured corporate representative democracy (democracy in name only) to the real and deep democracy of deliberative peoples and citizens assemblies.
We call on all scientists to sign this paper, and act in a united effort to avoid a catastrophic collapse of civilisation.
So my plan for meeting the climate apocalypse is to keep thinking, keep writing, keep farming and keep being hopeful (but not ‘optimistic’) as best I can. What’s yours?
Let’s just stop producing this great tidal wave of consumer goods. And let’s find other ways of measuring quality of life…
And so I leave Glasgow not optimistic or pessimistic, but infinitely more determined. And feeling like the power, the flow, the surge of Friday and Saturday’s tsunamis will carry us forward. I feel it at my back, I feel it in my stomach, and I will feel it forever.
Beyond our local context, the Food Sovereignty movement provides a global political framework for change based on social justice, solidarity, empowering women and re- organising international trade and economic relations.
