Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Remember in the midst of your neurosis and discouragement as you consider the huge problems we face: training ourselves and the upcoming generations to face life on earth with a cheerful frugality is advancing the revolution in its own slow way.
“How do we respond to collapse?” may be the most important question each of us needs to ask—and re-ask—ourselves and one another over the coming days, months, and years.
I’ve learned that I need to work on my own grief because it’s the only way I can access the depths within myself that are requisite of these times. Only then am I able to be clear about what is most important, and what my next right step should be.
One of the finest books I’ve read recently was ‘Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter’ by Ben Goldfarb. Ben is an American environmental journalist who has taken great interest in this remarkable creature and its ability to, as he put it when we spoke, “help tackle many of our ecological problems if we just get out of the way and let the rodent do the work”.
As farmer and Christian writer Wendell Berry made it clear in ‘The Pleasures of Eating’, most of us eat in great ignorance today. Faith and food have become, literally, like water and oil.
From my point of view –which comes from systems dynamics and environmentalism rather than from feminism– one of the tools that can best help feminist economics articulate a coherent discourse is the pattern of collapse.
As a story teller and pot-stirrer and social innovator I am now on the hunt for what will put the soil and water and regeneration story on everyone’s lips, to have teenagers to grandmothers march for healthy soil, to have policies that transform degraded land into garden landscapes.
We can rejoin the web of life. We do not have to be its destroyer. But our last best chance is now, and countless tasks lie ahead of us.
Hence, when the grief and rage threaten to consume me, I now orient myself around the question, “What are my obligations?” In other words, “From this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life?“
My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations.
Perhaps it isn’t enough to celebrate Earth Day once a year. Maybe we need to be thinking every day about what we need to do, where we go from here, and how we to face our future.
I believe that hope has a crucial role in healing, and in driving our engagement in effecting the deep transformation we need.
