Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Shanna Baker Though nature’s cycles are increasingly uncertain, the Nisg̱a’a relationship with the beloved oily oolie is steadfast. Once the grease is ready, the workers will siphon it off and strain it into jars—preserving a taste that links hundreds of generations of human and fish for another season.
In the coming months, I worry that the list of Trump’s affronts to localists will grow significantly longer. Sure, there will also be opportunities for localists. And when they arise—crowdfunding reforms, for example—we will advocate for them. But right now, dear localists, we need hypervigilance and clarity of thinking. We still have 1,423 days to go.
Today Nate is joined by psychiatrist and neurologist Iain McGilchrist for a deep dive on the implications of western society’s over-reliance on analysis and categorization on the quality and expectations of our leadership and governance systems.
These projects and many others like them are quite literally weaving traditional knowledge, culture, and Native values more deeply into these villages and communities across Southeast Alaska.
Our ability to organise and resist is vital, but I believe now more than ever that our true strength lies in our ability to cultivate longing, to build awesome Desire Machines.
“We share how lives are being lost, communities are being destroyed and big oil is making a trillion dollars a year and getting 20 billion dollars in tax breaks and subsidies. It’s all so crazy.”
Through the food gathering and pollination accidents of bees and other pollinators, the world’s most nutritious, tastiest fruits and vegetables are brought to the tables of the world’s 7.9 billion people. Indirectly, bees keep us well-fed.
Can we mature our understanding of wealth before it’s too late? Could we create regenerative cultures which transmute income back into wealth? And can we collectively recognize that true wealth cannot be found in our pockets but rather in the natural world we inhabit?
The pain of this moment offers a profound invitation: to re-educate ourselves, transmute our settler ignorance, and rise together in loving solidarity.
A self-sustaining forest ecosystem includes not just a mix of trees but the understory of smaller trees, shrubs and groundcover plants, the animals, the soil and its biota, and all the dead matter lying on the forest floor.
We do not all have to be working in the same way to confront urgent challenges of Trump 2.0. But if we foster a robust ecology of change, we may yet see the movement resurgence that we need.
The climate crisis is not only an extreme case of a collective challenge, but also an extremely complex one. Conventional notions of expertise and specialisation are therefore failing. The essence of radical honesty is to recognise this failure of our conventional ideas and to draw lessons from it.
