Overcoming Colonial Thinking to Connect With Life
In attending to my surroundings—from grasses to fences to building—my shoulders unclench and my breath slows. Any healing that might emerge in the environment, then, is mutual.
In attending to my surroundings—from grasses to fences to building—my shoulders unclench and my breath slows. Any healing that might emerge in the environment, then, is mutual.
My book ‘Uncommon Wealth’ and ‘BOOMERANG’ meets this challenge by examining how an honest reckoning with the legacies of empire can help us understand and address the roots of our current crises to finally create an economy that works for all.
Besides strengthening the call for degrowth in the global North, MMT can serve as a powerful tool to achieve full decolonization of the global South.
The third annual Post-Capitalism Conference took place this past weekend — with one major shift from previous years: the conference is now titled “Decolonizing Economics,” and far from being a simple title change, the theme of decolonization was quite prominently weaved through the entirety of summit’s sessions.
Given the documented superiority of stewardship on Indigenous-managed lands around the world, Housty and his colleagues argue that the place-based, values-based approach to conservation outlined in the paper should be emulated elsewhere. It’s time to “go back to what works,” he says, “because we’re going in the wrong direction.”
As seafaring colonizers divvied up the world and justified their actions using the Doctrine of Discovery, the era of land-grabbing imperialism led to outrageous exploitation of Indigenous peoples and ecosystems.
The Dawn of Everything, published in October 2021 by David Graeber and David Wengrow is 700 amazing pages breaking down self-fulfilling myths about humanity since the Ice Age.
As we work together to re-discover and build new empowering political systems of collective decision making, and life-giving economic systems that can meet our real needs, how do we ensure that they stay true to the intentions we’re setting out with? How do we surface, heal and create alternatives to our internalized and cultural habits of domination?
What changes to ourselves, our groups and wider society would help us to build new systems? Systems that can deliver fundamentally different outcomes to the one that has given us climate change and the many other environmental and social issues that we are struggling with globally.
In the midst of growing hunger from colonial academia we reflect on the need to right our relationships with the Indigenous and other racialized peoples with whom we work in Nicaragua.
With conversations about decolonising our institutions becoming more prominent, it’s important to remember that Thatcherism simply wouldn’t have triumphed in the UK without the defeat of another political vision then emerging from what was once among Britain’s most lucrative colonies: Jamaica.
So how, indeed, can those of us of colonialist heritage and good will do the serious work of deconstructing, then reconstructing and healing our ancestral heritage in our own minds and lives, while sorting out and holding fast to the beliefs, attitudes, practical knowledge and skills that might be useful and beneficial?