Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The fact that climate change is mostly caused by the rich and yet the poorest, who have done least to cause it and have the least resources to respond, will be hit most seriously by the damaging impacts – is uncomfortable. But it is important.
All alarms have gone off in Latin America’s democracies. Bolsonaro’s triumph in Brazil is the consolidation of an emerging global trend which uses social aversion to politics to establish authoritarian and often openly anti-democratic alternatives.
Is it possible to transform politics around values such as empathy, solidarity and love? Many progressive commentators think so, and have laid out different plans to put these ideas into practice. But empathy and love seem in short supply in the actuality of politics today, crowded out by hate and intolerance.
It seems that the short lived cycles of electoral politics means that politicians chase short-term goals, rather than tackling problems such as climate change which require long-term, global thinking. The test of a capable politician in 2018 is whether they take a stand against cavalier resource extraction.
My overall purpose in writing this series is to raise questions about how Transition might become a space and a community that provides what people want and need while staying true to its missions of powering-down and building resilience. My working answer is to consider modeling Transition Initiatives more like a faith community and more like a political party — two things that are central to many people’s identity, and to which they show up and work at and for (dare I say) religiously.
‘Overshoot’ is when a species uses resources faster than can be replenished. We’re already there. And show no signs of changing. Humans have a virtually unlimited capacity for self-delusion, even when self-preservation is at stake.
I remember the birth of antipolitics. I was a young woman when dissidents in the communist world began to associate official political activity with support for an immoral order. Voting, they believed, was an empty gesture if the ruling party won 99% of the ballots cast.
So being a political being doesn’t necessarily mean knowing anything about parties, about who won what and who did what to who. Being political, in my understanding, first means dreaming, imagining the society you want to live in, the interactions you want to have, and acting upon it.
Nor is there any need for politics to be something inflicted on us, at great cost to our souls, by tyrannical, abstract systems. Instead it should and could be something we recapture from its lofty conceptual realms, disarm, bring down to earth, and revive — in the process remaking ourselves and our world.
In the contemporary political landscape, the commons blur the lines of the ‘private’ and ‘public’ sectors as we have known them in the last century.
How different would the world be if the grace and poise shown at Standing Rock were to influence our wider political culture? Very different.
One of the big challenges faced by any student of current events is that of seeing past the turmoil of the present moment to catch the deep trends shaping events on a broader scale.
