By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
The days ahead will be days of pushing, struggling, campaigning and fighting. The old order does not let go easily. But they must also be days of attention, care, beauty, imagination. These days may prove to have just been the calm before the storm. But oh, what a calm it was.
By Stephan Harding, Schumacher College
To steer ourselves towards compassion we need to dedicate ourselves to becoming Gaia-wise. Spending time in nature deeply listening to birdsong – that’s a good way to start.
By Kavita Byrd, Resilience.org
The love and interconnectedness that is awakening and being expressed – selfless acts of kindness, neighbors helping each other, local self-reliance, community mutual aid groups -- are the seeds of another possible future. Yet, heartening as they are, it is critical that they be up-leveled to encompass the systemic dimension as well as personal and local expressions.
By Laura Johnson, Tikkun
Now, here in a changed world with a broken-open heart, I look into the eyes of beauty and invite in the fullness of it all, the grief and the love, the fear and the hope, the pain and the joy.
By Charles Eisenstein, Charles Eisenstein blog
For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?
By Kim Stoddart, Sustainable Food Trust
One can only hope that this wave of newbie gardeners carries on regardless, once we emerge from this crisis, blinking into the brave new greener world ahead of us.
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
Let’s listen to the voices of the original, indigenous caretakers of the lands we now inhabit. This body of wisdom and practical, replicable models is readily available for us to learn and activate in our own communities. Let’s take this time to see how we can do that. I invite each of you to share your own sources of inspiration, solutions and hands-on practical knowledge that we can use as we forge ahead with a new way of being.
By Gabriella Rutherford, Intercontinental Cry
Located in the Bocas del Toro region of Panama, the Naso have held steadfast to their goal. Like the nearby Ngäbe-Buglé kingdom, they want to create a comarca indígena or demarcated territory that would cover 160,000 hectares of their ancestral homeland. Unfortunately, they have encountered some resistance; because their vision of a secured territory conflicts with the government’s interests in the land the Naso call home.
By Erik Assadourian, Gaianism
So get outside every day. Somewhere. Walk barefoot through a park, collect some wild edibles, do some yoga in your yard, some breathing exercises in the forest, or simply sit under a tree somewhere, whatever you can. This will help heal you, and keep you happy in the unplugged world and tethered to the real world.
By Damaris Zehner, Integrity of Life
Our civilization will eventually fail – through resource exhaustion, overreach, and hubris. The fact that many people counter that claim with the Panglossian insistence that we’ll think of something, that our technology will enable us to go on isolating ourselves from the laws of nature, is just proof of what I’m saying: a lack of exposure to the natural world makes humans stu– well, not as smart as we could be. And I predict that in the near future we will need to get smarter in a hurry.
By Alexis Rider, Journal of the History of Ideas Blog
In the basic conception of the Anthropocene, there are two actors: mankind and the environment. This sweeping and seemingly compelling divide at once highlights the separation of the two categories and collapses it: if humans are geologic force, we can no longer imagine ourselves outside of nature.
By Sandra Lubarsky, Resilience.org
It is important to make the connection between beauty and nature obvious and to name beauty as the quality in nature we so desire. If we don’t, we continue allegiance to the very paradigm that has been so destructive of the human-nature relations, the paradigm that erased value from the natural world and made beauty nothing more than a subjective opinion.