More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the basic power dynamic—our countries relying on the wealth embedded in their land—remains unchanged. For
admit to the “why” behind centuries of abuse and land theft. And there can be no reconciliation when the crime is still in progress.
about our old stories will the new stories arrive to guide us. Stories that recognize that the natural world and all its inhabitants have limits. Stories that teach us how to care for each other and regenerate life within those limits. Stories that put an end to the myth of endlessness once and for all.
Never, ever underestimate the power of hate. Never underestimate the power of direct appeals to power over “the other”—the migrant, the Muslim, black people, women.
urgently confront and battle racism and misogyny, in our culture, in our movements, in ourselves.
when we fight against war and climate change and economic inequality, it will benefit black people and Indigenous people the most because they are most victimized by the current system.
necessary to win unless we embed justice—particularly racial but also gender and economic justice—at the center of our low-carbon policies.
an economy which fails to respect ecological and ethical limits.” Limits are a problem for our economic system. Ours is a culture of endless taking, as if there were no end and no consequences. A culture of grabbing and going.
taking to a culture of consent and caretaking. Caring for the planet, and for one another.
jobs around the world in the shift to a postcarbon economy—in renewables, in public transit, in efficiency, in retrofits, in cleaning up polluted land and water.
These are bottom-up, democratically conceived plans for a justice-based transition off fossil fuels. And we need them developed in every sector (from health care to education to media) and multiplied around the world.
Warriors step up for the right to clean water, to good schools, to desperately needed decent-paying jobs, to universal health care. Warriors step up for the reunification of families separated by war and cruel immigration
It is striking that many of the people doing the most crucial work in this country—protecting the most vulnerable people and defending fragile ecologies from industrial onslaught—are facing a kind of dirty war.
Oh, and this idea that your coal is somehow a humanitarian gift to India’s poor? That has to stop. India is suffering more under coal pollution and the climate change it fuels than almost anywhere else on earth. A few months ago, it was so hot in Delhi that some of the roads melted. Since 2013, more than four thousand Indians have died in heat waves. This week, they closed all the schools in Delhi because pollution was so thick that they had to declare an emergency.
When people can generate their own electricity from panels on their rooftops, and even feed that power back into a micro grid, they are no longer customers of giant utilities; they are competitors. No wonder so many roadblocks are being put up: Corporations love nothing more than a captive market.
You are breathing in forest.
the state has become intensely reliant on prison labor, with inmates paid a staggeringly low hourly rate of one dollar
environmental reporting at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
as solar radiation management, which would see sulfur dioxide sprayed into the stratosphere to create a barrier between Earth and the sun, forcibly lowering temperatures. Trump’s
sun-dimming seriously.
satellites, but beyond that is the heavens, the unknown, the ultimate “out there.”
The state of emergency has been extended for the fourth time. But even
collective house is on fire, with every alarm going off simultaneously, clanging desperately for our attention. Will we keep stumbling and wheezing through the low light, acting as if the emergency were not already upon us? Or will the warnings be enough to force many more of us to listen?
who, in a cloud of smoke, are nonetheless putting their bodies on the line to stop an oil pipeline from being built on their fire-scarred land?
Those are the questions still hanging in the air at the end of t...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Donald Trump is too busy trying to get black athletes fired, smearing them for daring to shine a spotlight on racist violence.
same overlapping elements: accelerating climate chaos; militarism; histories of colonialism; a weak and neglected public sphere; a totally dysfunctional democracy. And overlaying it all: the seemingly bottomless capacity to discount the lives of huge numbers of black and brown people.
merger of all that is noxious in the culture, economy, and body politic, all kind of glommed together in a self-adhesive mass. And we’re finding it very, very hard to dislodge. It gets so grim that we have to laugh. But make no mistake: whether it’s climate change or the nuclear threat, Trump represents a crisis that could echo through geologic time.
To win in a moment of true crisis, we also need a bold and forward-looking “yes,” a plan for how to rebuild and respond to the underlying causes of crisis. And that plan needs to be convincing, credible and, most of all, captivating.
free tuition, fully funded health care, aggressive climate action.
that political parties don’t need to fear the creativity and independence of social movements—and social movements, likewise, have a huge amount to gain from engaging with electoral politics.
so, these movements started to dream together, laying out bold and different visions of the future, and credible pathways out of crisis. And most important, they began engaging with political parties, to try to win power. We saw it in Bernie Sanders’s historic campaign in the 2016
A big part of the answer is: Keeping it up. Keep building that “yes.” But
gig and dig economy to a society based on principles of care and repair; where the work of our caregivers and of our land and water protectors is respected and valued; a world where no one and nowhere is thrown away, whether in firetrap housing estates or on hurricane-ravaged islands.
firmly believe that all this work, challenging as it is, is a crucial part of the path to victory; that the more ambitious, consistent, and holistic you can be in painting a picture of the world transformed, the more credible a Labour government will become.
since the piece went online.I Others have remarked on the maddening invocations of “human nature” and the use of the royal “we” to describe a screamingly homogenous group of US power players.
moment of peak ideological ascendency for the economic and social project that deliberately set out to vilify collective action
name of liberating “free markets” in every aspect of life. Yet Rich makes no mention of this parallel upheaval in economic and political thought.
license to export the Reagan-Thatcher recipe for privatization, deregulation, and economic austerity to every corner of the globe.
’90s—it still is today—but it would have demanded a head-on battle with the project of neoliberalism, which at that time was waging war on the very idea of the public sphere. (“There
are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe, and that would benefit the vast majority, are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.” Why
that economic order and try to replace it with something that is rooted in both human and planetary security, one that does not place at its center the quest for growth and profit at all costs.
green Democratic Socialists is advancing in the United States with precisely that vision. And that represents more than just an electoral alternative—it’s our one and only planetary lifeline.
Democratic Socialists of America
‘capitalism’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe.’ Beyond capitalism, *humankind* is fully capable of organizing societies to thrive within ecological limits.”
of different social orders, including societies with much longer time horizons and far more respect for natural life-support systems.
Earth-centered cosmologies alive to this day. Capitalism is a tiny blip in the collective story of our species.
historic catalyst for a just recovery and a just transition to the next economy. Right now.
time to plan for joy and design for liberation, so that when the next storm comes—and it will—the winds will roar and the trees will bend, but Puerto Rico will show the world that it can never be broken.
imminent ecological unraveling, gaping economic inequality (including the racial and gender wealth gaps), and surging white supremacy.
