Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
At least 124,000 U.S. public and private schools have closed in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak. In some states, schools will remain closed through the end of the academic year. Amidst the transition to remote learning, school officials are taking unprecedented steps to ensure students have enough to eat.
Change needs to be systemic to match the scale of the emergency and the inequalities uncovered and reproduced by the pandemic. This crisis can and should be used as a collective learning point for a transformation towards an alternative feminist degrowth future.
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.
Our practices must return to regenerative methods that work with natural processes, instead of against them. We’ve knocked things so far out of balance that the road back to health will be challenging, but the sooner we get to it, the better.
As we turn our attention to our closest neighbours and seek to support those within our own communities, let us not forget our responsibility to the most vulnerable and disadvantaged members of the human race. Even as we are forced to live locally, it is critical that we think globally.
For those of us working for change at local, municipal and regional scales, this is the moment when many of the solutions we’ve been promoting are needed and the conditions for building the foundations for longer term change are favourable.
What matters is that we commit ourselves to a practice that helps us to periodically reflect on who we are at our core, discipline our minds to be steady and clear, and grow in our capacity to be of greater service to others over time.
How could local authorities raise their game and start to shift the balance towards more local food resilience? There are a few pointers towards a more radical approach. One is the way that many have declared climate emergencies and begun to work with citizen groups to find new ways forward.
It would be arrogant and irresponsible for the global North not to look to cultures in the global South that have sustained themselves for vastly longer than it has taken industrial capitalism to annihilate much of the living world.
If we are to follow this path that sustains life rather than the one that is destroying it we need more than the collection of great ideas and projects being put forth by so many brilliant people. We need a comprehensive, holistic plan. This will not be easy but the alternative will be far more difficult.
A community, or as Wendell Berry describes it, that “commonwealth and common interests, commonly understood, of people living together in a place and wishing to do so,” is necessarily a decision-making body.
According to Cantadora and Wise Woman, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Descansos are symbols that mark a death: as an example, a cross by the wayside with the name of the person who died spelled out in nails. Can we create Descansos for our dying civilization? For die it must if we are to live. Let these words be my Descansos offered in gratitude to She Who Loves Us All.
