Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We lose the ability to argue productively, to hash out a compromise, and to agree to disagree when we keep ourselves isolated from our group of 150 known people. We cease to be the intelligent social primates we evolved to be and instead are reduced to the ghost in the machine. The consequences for individuals and society are monumental.
How can we make our neighborhoods more resilient to disasters and other disruptions? What initiatives and communities can we learn from? How can we turn existing community spaces into resilience hubs that can serve the community in an uncertain future?
In this aging epoch of ours, is it too late to envision a return to something different? Is there a rite, an investiture in the holy office of simple labor, a smoking censer swinging high and low that would cleanse our mess with a restorative blessing, allowing us to stay, to work on and with the earth?
As the school year beckons, I would like to invite teachers to join me in co-creating an on-line knowledge action network – Transition U – as a space to share our thoughts, materials, best practices, syllabi, and any other resources we have for engaging our students both inside and outside the classroom in learning about the climate crisis, climate justice, and building resilient communities wherever we are.
When LaDonna Brave Bull Allard speaks these days, it’s a wake-up call to a lost nation. The founder of the first resistance camp at Standing Rock, which was Sacred Stone, she challenges us to step up to the work of transforming our culture of death.
In the first episode of our second season, The Response travels to Mexico City and puts the focus on the 2017 Puebla Earthquake — a magnitude 7.1 quake that toppled over forty buildings and killed over 350 people. Specifically, we explore the significance of information flows by telling the story of a very unique initiative that arose in the wake of the earthquake.
“Managed retreat” is a controversial response to climate change. It’s the idea that communities and governments should be strategic about moving people away from areas that have become too waterlogged to live in safely.
When it comes to our own survival in changed circumstances, one of the most dysfunctional things we do as a culture is invest in things. Material things are nice, of course, and their existence and proliferation are one of the markers of civilization, but they have a down side.
Food security, traditional agriculture, and local self-reliance are key to regenerative societies of the future, say water protectors taking the movement’s lessons forward.
So today, various relocalization movements need to develop a cultural analog of TCP/IP to help local actors interconnect and inhabit a common space.
In general, the power of the elite cannot be confronted by timidly asking or jumping to compromises. It can only be confronted by hampering the source of their power in the first place: the ability to make a profit.
As the fault lines in the global economy continue to grow, and the desire for genuine human connection becomes ever more keenly felt, these existing initiatives will provide direction as well as inspiration, and stand as a compelling alternative to the faux-localist path of violence, fear, and hate.
