Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
One of the many facets of humanity threatened by climate change is language itself, our ability to construct narrative to make sense of the world around us. How does a collection of words capture what confounds the limits of human imagination? How do you thread together a story about the unweaving of life?
We need a vision of prosperity that is ambitious, bold, accessible and attentive to local concerns. Climate justice movements have always known that to address the climate crisis would require addressing inequality.
So much has been written already about Donald Trump, the election of 2016, and the horrors that surely lie ahead of us, that it is impossible to single out just one piece to focus hearts and minds. Therefore, taking the long view – and why not? Heaven help us if it’s a day more than four years – here is some of the deep background that you might want to explore on those long winter nights that try our souls.
The Leap is a manifesto that aspires to spark and inform a movement. I was one of hundreds who attended a meeting where it was presented to a global audience at COP 21 in Paris in December of 2015. There was real enthusiasm in a room of intergenerationals, much of it for a chance to hear Klein and her husband Avi Lewis, whose film based on the book, and is also titled This Changes Everything, had just been released.
Here are just a few things that have shifted in our world because of the extraordinary Native-led uprising at Standing Rock.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has defied history.
Heavy snow and winter cold settled this month on thousands of Native Americans and their supporters encamped on the banks of the Cannonball River, some 30 miles south of Bismarck, North Dakota.
Standing Rock is an unpredicted history lesson for all of us.
As people from around the country continue to converge in Standing Rock, and less than a week after police blasted water protectors with water cannons in freezing temperatures while gassing them in a confined space, the Army Corps of Engineers has lived up to a long-held tradition of the United States government — the displacement of Native peoples.
President Barack Obama, in an interview with Versha Sharma of NowThis News, said that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers may consider a reroute of the hotly contested Dakota Access Pipeline, one which would presumably not cross sacred Native American sites.
What if we held a conference and nobody came?
In a vindication for press freedom and land protectors fighting against the Dakota Access Pipeline, North Dakota has dismissed the “riot” charges against Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman, issued after she reported on pipeline company security guards physically assaulting nonviolent, mostly Indigenous land protectors in September.
