Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Individuals do make choices, but these are facilitated and constrained by the society in which they live. Therefore, it may be more useful to question the system that requires many of us to travel and consume energy as we do.
I like giving the example that we humans can behave like cancerous cells. Working out of a disconnection from nature, as if we are separate from other natural aspects is similar to when cells stop communicating with the whole system.
To understand the problems of our day, I realized that I needed to understand how our attention was being fragmented, pulled and pushed by technology’s forces. Attention became the lens through which I began to understand technology.
There is one action that can make major strides in many of the world’s greatest challenges. It is generally overlooked, undersold, and ignored. It’s this: transitioning the economy to a distributed, non-carbon energy system.
It is, has been, and always will be, harder to care than to be apathetic. Life can be difficult when, as an environmentalist, you truly care about the current and future well-beings of the diversity around you.
If we then ask which sections of society are concerned about the environment, the answer is largely people in the least developed societies; the indigenous populations – or the remnants of them; tribal societies and first nations in Canada.
What do all these ideas have in common—a tax on carbon, big investments in renewable energy, a livable minimum wage, and freely accessible healthcare? The answer is that we need all of them, but even taken together they’re utterly insufficient to redirect humanity away from impending catastrophe and toward a truly flourishing future.
This is the discovery I make: we are all living liminal lives. Denying this is part of the madness. The only real thing is the liminality of life, the moments when we can inhabit fluidity, accept the threshold. We are just passing through, why should we expect anything other than being between places and times and states of being.
It is in the midst of these devastating new realities that Lynne Segal’s book Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy has appeared on the literary scene. In her new book, Segal adamantly refuses despair.
Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct was published a few months ago, but it has taken me this long to process, as almost every page caused me to rethink what I held to be true. Bringing together cultural history with neuroscience, Lent develops a new discipline he calls cognitive history.
As our planet rockets into a new geological epoch, we find ourselves on unfamiliar terrain. The only thing that is certain is that no one knows what will happen, and no one is in control. The rest of our lives will be defined by an exponential ecological entropy that will increasingly destabilize both the economic and political foundations upon which the modern world has been built. All bets are off. The collapse will be anything but boring.
This is a remarkable and inspiring movement in Spain, now involving hundreds of people in what I regard as an example of The Simpler Way transition strategy … which is primarily about going underneath the conventional economy to build our own new collective economy to meet community needs, turning our backs on and deliberately undermining and eventually replacing both the capitalist system and control by the state.
