Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is Vice President of Policy & Strategy for Data for Progress and Narrative Change Director for the Natural History Museum. Julian provides his insight on What Could Possibly Go Right?
We must learn from our elders, so we can enjoy abundant gardens, nutritious food and a closeness to Nature for many generations to come.
In preparing for disaster – and re-developing after disaster occurs – we must guide the redevelopment with a new kind of political economy that is socially just AND pulls back economic activity from recreating the same problems over and again.
This is our vision and our contribution to the transformations we need around the world. If we really want to survive on this planet, we have to take care of our own biodiversity.
COVID-19 is a wake-up call about how we should live in harmony with Nature, as our ancestors in Tharaka once did.
Even as communities begin picking themselves up after the devastation, West Coast climate activists are experimenting with what an effective response to such crises looks like.
Across Africa, a network of Earth Jurisprudence Practitioners is accompanying traditional and indigenous communities in the revival and enhancement of their Earth-centred customary governance systems.
Growth, in this new story, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient.
The signals of transformation I talk about are not concepts, and they are not the fruits of a vivid imagination. They are happening now.
It took a pandemic to reveal that the most resilient communities are oftentimes the most overlooked. It’s time to listen and learn from indigenous knowledge and livelihoods.
Protecting and restoring Indigenous Peoples’ lands is the fastest and most readily available way to sequester carbon and mitigate the impacts of climate change, a result of the optimally efficient relationships between fungi, plants, animals, and people in a given bioregion, which Indigenous cultures have coded into their knowledge systems over millennia of human-environmental interactions.
This century’s pandemic, COVID-19, is history repeating itself and part of a process that has never ended. If mentioning colonialism as an unfinished process bothers those who claim all the technological advances of our space-time, for indigenous peoples it is a concrete reality.
One of our slogans which we diggers promote is ‘reclaim and extend the commons!’ Yet we have been as surprised as anybody else that this extension and reclamation of the commons should take this form of mass community mutual aid.
When we are able to quiet all the worries, the media, and public frenzy, we can see a bigger picture: This moment is an opportunity to come together in community, in care, and in preparation. Grave threats like climate change and pandemics are real—we know this as crisis scenarios become more frequent and more extreme.
