By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog
Western civilization seems to be thrashing about like a feverish patient. Will it recover from civilizational decline, or is this the end of the road? Even with the best interventions by the money doctors, it might not return to its old self, patched up and ready for another go at it.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
The coronavirus pandemic is, among other things, a tribute to human ingenuity and our relentless pursuit of globalization, an impulse thousands of years old. Previous civilizations, from the Romans to the Mongols, traded aggressively and invaded new ecosystems. It didn't end particularly well.
By Kamran Nayeri, Our Place in the World
The fight for ecocentrism, like the fight for human emancipation, is a fight for universal values. Without ecocentrism, that is not just an intellectual point of view but a genuine love for nature and for life on Earth, there will be no humanity and no human emancipation.
By Charlotte Du Cann, Charlotte Du Cann blog
In a year where biblical calamities have rained down upon the world – as floods, bush fires and locust storms– this fracture has not emerged in the highly stressed natural world but from within a globalised human society. After ignoring the cries of Cassandra for decades, the horse has finally entered the gates of the cities, releasing billions of tiny invisible lifeforms that are no respecters of age, gender, wealth, position or race.
By Julian Cribb, The Guardian blog
We have only one rational choice: to choose to survive. This demands all necessary actions – although they spell the end of existing systems of energy, food, water, money, defence, transport and politics – and their replacement with new ones, universally dedicated to a viable, just and sustainable human and planetary future.
By Laurie Cone, Resilience.org
This will be a transition that could lead to a world that is increasingly more just and less desecrated, but we will be doing hard things that we’ve never done. Surprising allies may appear. We may or may not see the fruit of our work. But we’re here now, capable of doing our part, and the world and her inhabitants are still full of beauty and wonder, and there’s no time to waste.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
We’ve begun to experience collapse in all spheres of life. Collapse can be both slow and rapid. It is a series of unending emergencies. Instead of responding or preparing, we’re cheering on a fight between fantasies.
By Rupert Read, Extinction Rebellion
The stakes of course are very, very high, here, because the climate crisis and the broader ecological emergency of which it is only the most urgent part puts the whole of what we know as civilisation at risk. By ‘this civilisation’ I mean the hegemonic civilisation of globalised industrial growth capitalism— sometimes called ‘Empire’—which today governs the vast majority of human life on Earth.
By Brooke Lavelle, Zack Walsh, Open Democracy
What we face is a turning point between two futures: The Great Transition and the Great Unraveling. The Great Transition describes a future in which society is comprehensively reorganized to sustain itself in dynamic equilibrium with the Earth’s systems.
By Umair Haque, Medium.com
Our challenge now, in this new century, is this. Nourishing, replenishing, nurturing, renewing, endowing. What? Everything that we can. Everything from basic incomes to to trees to insects to glaciers to hospitals to schools to retirement to mountains and forests. Do you see how the theme of nourishment and replenishment is what flows through all our challenges, like a great laughing river, renewing a parched, weeping ocean?
By Damaris Zehner, Resilience.org
Remember in the midst of your neurosis and discouragement as you consider the huge problems we face: training ourselves and the upcoming generations to face life on earth with a cheerful frugality is advancing the revolution in its own slow way.
By Nafeez Ahmed, Insurge Intelligence
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’.