Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When a local organizer for a new adult education project in Austin, Texas, asked me to teach a course on politics in January, it was tempting to focus on the potentially disastrous short-term consequences of the election. Instead, I decided to frame the course around the disastrous long-term forces that shape the contemporary United States, no matter who is in office.
Not since the Civil War has an American presidential Inauguration Day been so fraught with fear and dread (on February 23, 1861, Abraham Lincoln traveled to his inauguration under military guard, arriving in Washington, D.C., in disguise). The incoming president is the most unpopular of any to assume office since modern polling began.
I’ve never written a blog. I was advised to choose something that feels pertinent to me at the moment. Maybe activism, more specifically, community activism. Even more specifically, local community activism. Can local community activism as we experience it in Hungarian Transition somehow be regarded as an example of that focus of much adulation, social innovation?
This week on Sea Change Radio, in the second half of our discussion with former senior advisers to the Bernie Sanders campaign, Becky Bond and Zack Exley, host Alex Wise struggles with the harsh reality of an incoming President completely unqualified and unprepared to lead the planet’s only superpower.
Since June we have been compiling monthly bulletins which highlight the reality of current climate change―impacts such as storms, droughts, floods, and scorching heat. We call it “The World at 1°C” to acknowledge the terrible fact that the global average temperature is already 1°C warmer than it was before the industrial revolution. In fact, it is now already 1.2°C warmer.
Novels, short stories, photos, art, music, and performance are just a few of the ways we are telling and intend to tell more of the stories of climate justice around the world. This last essay explores the power of another medium for telling stories, and presents some of the most compelling recent film and video work that tells us on some profound plane of existence what we must do about the huge problems we face.
We hear from Becky Bond and Zack Exley, two senior advisers from the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign and authors of the new book, “Rules For Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything.”
So below I offer my own thoughts on how to move closer to the worlds we want, based on much comparative reflection on the stories of people everywhere who have acted in the name of radical social change, which for me, means something like “deep transformation of a society”…
Yesterday’s installment of the What Now: Momentum Slowed series addressed the likely first blasts of the Trumpeters to weaken the current federal framework of clean energy and environmental rules, policies and programs. Today I am continuing that discussion starting in the agency regulatory arena and moving on to the courts.
Nonviolent campaigns are often dramatic and catch the attention of millions—think of Standing Rock water protectors resolute in the face of a brutal police force. All the more puzzling that the concept of a “nonviolent campaign” is little known and often ignored when people talk about how to mobilize power, for example, to prevent Donald Trump from erasing gains made in addressing climate change.
So much has been written already about Donald Trump, the election of 2016, and the horrors that surely lie ahead of us, that it is impossible to single out just one piece to focus hearts and minds. Therefore, taking the long view – and why not? Heaven help us if it’s a day more than four years – here is some of the deep background that you might want to explore on those long winter nights that try our souls.
The Leap is a manifesto that aspires to spark and inform a movement. I was one of hundreds who attended a meeting where it was presented to a global audience at COP 21 in Paris in December of 2015. There was real enthusiasm in a room of intergenerationals, much of it for a chance to hear Klein and her husband Avi Lewis, whose film based on the book, and is also titled This Changes Everything, had just been released.
