Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Communality, defined by P. Kropotkin (1907) as mutual aid institutions, was present throughout tribal organization, the village commune, the guilds, the city of the Middle Ages, and today it remains a focus of resistance in communities of indigenous cultures and cooperatives (rural, urban and industrial).
Education must prepare the young students to make the most of the opportunities which the coming crisis will offer, or at the very least, to be resilient to those changes and be able to adapt to the emerging new world.
Deforestation is one of the most intractable and yet most potent drivers of environmental crisis. It is also among the four out of nine planetary boundaries that civilisation was already at high risk of crossing five years ago according to research published in the journal Science.
The awareness of life is based on language, a huge puzzle of meanings that are entangled, and that form a lens through which we perceive the past, the present, the future and the invisible. Here, at the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, along the Xingu River and its main tributary, the Iriri, traces of a missing population are found.
Any tool or circumstance that enables Indigenous people to fortify their traditions, territories and practices, while carrying them into the next generations, will be of great benefit to the global community. The COVID-19 pandemic may just give the proper pretext to support this important process globally.
Like most people, I hoped climate policy would improve, but years of infighting and adversarial politics have resulted in a dearth of climate action, where cooperation might well have yielded positive results.
One solution to this frustrating deadlock is to place the responsibility for climate policy at arm’s length from political actors. We need a Council for the Future, tasked with the long-term thinking that eludes so many of our elected representatives.
But the reality of our lives, irrespective of wealth or position, is that we are thoroughly interdependent with each other, the socio-economic networks that bind us, and the planet and its living system that holds us all. When we tear at the fabric of our relationships, we undermine the welfare of all, and our capacities to face the dire challenges ahead.
So despite the good intentions, now is not the time to be defending Britain’s broken democracy. Instead, we should be demanding a democratic revolution.
The war is because the future USA will not look like the past USA, in who is here and who has rights and powers. The question is how we survive the transition – or rather how we shape it so that the vulnerable survive and thrive.
The royal, prophetic, and apocalyptic traditions in the Hebrew and Christian bibles provide a compelling framework for understanding progressive intellectual and political work today, as we face the task not only of struggling to create a just and sustainable world but also imagining a saving remnant that will negotiate a radically different future in which both new and old skills, stories, and spaces will be necessary.
It was great to have 146 Transitioners, from 84 different groups, come along to the workshops. But what brought them here? What was their passion and when did they begin their Transition journey? All of this fed into the beginning of our conversations about connecting regionally.
While we recognize the powerful forces of social reproduction that stymie progressive change and make addressing climate change in time highly unlikely, a trajectory for social transformation has begun and we must stand up together to demand change.
