Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For many, the defining political sensation of our day is disorientation. We often feel torn apart in every direction. Even if we grasp the profound depth of the problems we face, navigating this seismic landscape towards something better always seems beyond us.
In October last year, a volcano went off in the conversation around gender and power. You most likely heard it. Catalysed by courageous first person accounts of sexual harassment and assault, Harvey Weinstein – one of the biggest executives in filmmaking – was forced from his place of power in Hollywood while a wave of empathy and solidarity with those who spoke out swept across social media via the #MeToo campaign.
Progressives need to breathe deeply and make our peace with the reality. Division expresses an economic arrangement, and it’s not something we can fix through urging more civil discourse. Even though we’ll want to use our conflict resolution skills in order to cope, we can also expect more drama at the extreme ends of our polarizations, and more ugliness and violence.
Having said all that, it’s important to recognise that not all forms of lifestylist responses to social problems lack a structural critique. In fact there are radical forms of lifestylism that are firmly based on a critical analysis of social structures and how they can change.
In recognition of the unique challenges and opportunities women-identified activists face in training for and leading movements for social change, along with research that suggests that the inclusion of women in nonviolent movements is critical for building more peaceful societies, we launched the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative Summer Institute to elevate and amplify the work that women activists are doing to catalyze social change.
Rob Levin, a Quaker attorney in Portland, Maine, has been concerned about the growing climate crisis for years. Recently, he came to see that using nonviolent direct action could increase his effectiveness on the issue.
There is a lot for us to do, and unless we have public space — unless we push back against all the ways that politicians at all levels try to privatize, monetize or securitize space — we can’t do the work of building a different kind of society and a different kind of world.
This column, like others in the Canaries in the Coal Mine series, is intended to raise early warnings of dangers that might be lurking beyond the immediate attention of clean energy advocates and climate defenders. Today’s tale continues the discussion about the 2018 midterm elections and what they could mean for federal clean energy and climate policies and programs. c
This column, like others in the Canaries in the Coal Mine series, is intended to raise early warnings of dangers that might be lurking beyond the immediate attention of clean energy advocates and climate defenders. Today’s cautionary tale is about the 2018 midterm elections and what they could mean for federal clean energy and climate policies and programs.
On December 16 anti-pipeline activists calling themselves water protectors gathered in Rayne, Louisiana, on land located along the proposed route of the Bayou Bridge pipeline. The gathering occurred two days after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality granted Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) the last permit needed to build the pipeline.
What lies in fact between or beyond direct action, prefigurative communities, and meaningful elections? One idea that occurs to me (and has occurred to others, as well – see Micah White’s excellent The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution) is to combine electing some as yet unknown kind of “progressive” government and forging social movements to push it from below and alongside to make good on its promises, and for the new kind of parties that would lead such governments to make links with other movements, nations, and organizations everywhere.
Look out the window, see the air between your eyes and the horizon. This is the Anthropocene – a new geological age characterized by the critical impacts of human activities on the Earth’s systems. Every word you will ever speak will be articulated using this changed air. The Anthropocene can be understood not as an issue but a context: it is the world we do and will, from now on, inhabit…
