Imagine a global network of mutually supportive local communities making mindful and appropriate use of digital, information, and communication technologies to share and exchange the non-material resources that can and should flow freely around the globe: knowledge, ideas, practices, skills, innovations, and culture. Material resources – tangible things – are sometimes exchanged among and between them, but only to the extent socially and ecologically sustainable and not primarily for the  purpose of making a profit. This arrangement offers an alluring alternative to the kind of totalizing globalization that drowned out local cultures and subsumed place-based economies into a homogenized global system that extracts, exploits, and erodes the planet’s life supporting capacity.

Beginning on Friday, August 2, 2024, global financial markets took a dramatic turn that has impacted both the high-flying US tech stocks and markets in countries around the world, particularly in Japan. Many people—avid market watchers, lay investors, and collapse-attuned folks scanning the horizon for signs of worsening instability—are wondering what is happening here. I’m someone who falls into all of those categories, having been concerned about collapse before the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 and watching the markets quite closely ever since, but only in a non-professional capacity. I became a member of the Sterling EcoGather community through the “Surviving the Future” courses, and have been coming here regularly to connect with others who are similarly concerned. While I claim no insight into the future, I have been able to identify a number of factors at play here that are worth noting and connecting. Additionally, while I may not be privy to the kinds of inside information available only to those who organize their entire lives and careers around finance, I am well-read on this topic, practiced in seeing the connections in complex systems, and capable of bringing a collapse aware perspective to current events—something that most financial commentators lack.

Liberation, freedom from oppression, and social justice demand of us an awareness of justice and inequality, a deep and thick empathy, and actions that organize, resource, and shape change. All of these are learned skills. We learn them from each other, from our ancestors, and from our history. We learn by taking risks, finding brave spaces, and by listening. The outcomes of this kind of learning are wellbeing, hopefulness, and optimism. 

Our stories allow us to connect with folks - be it around food systems, the environment, or creating a brilliantly neuromixed world. They make it possible to feel each other’s experience. Stories usually solve more than one problem at a time - and in this case that means they can connect people with different experiences at the same time as they create a world we want to live in or even can live in for longer. They help us look in two directions at once. We are looking backwards to gather the seeds we will plant that will grow to be a world we want to inhabit in the future. This is a different kind of activism that I feel could both grow out of a neuromixed world and grow into one. Worldbuilding is not agitating for or against anything - it is the creative endeavor of moving together into the future. Something that neuroqueer folks have always had to do

We are here. And like any generation before, we cannot chart a new path forward without the support and wisdom of our elders. But we cannot do it with our elders unless you help us face and change the realities in which our young minds and bodies and spirits can no longer survive. We need you to start asking with us: what does thriving—REAL thriving—look like? What can it look like if we are brave enough to imagine new worlds, and then to build them, together, in the shell of this broken one?

We see change as a paradigm shift - a new way of thinking and seeing the world that breaks down the old systems and builds up more relational, more humane, and more collapse-responsive ways of being. Good ideas are not enough. To truly make an impact, we need to find people and build communities and coalitions - but how? That need to create connection and build bridges is THE work of change shaping. It is the heart of finding, making, and inhabiting a world in which we share care and build alternate futures.

In a culture as obsessed with speaking – and feeling heard (which isn’t the same as being listened to) – as ours, it’s no wonder language first felt like a slinky to me. The fragile single helix was slinking and moving out of control, taking on the form of the plastic branding of the consumerist culture we live in. What looked like a single helix was actually a broken strand of DNA, the helix of speaking, expression, language ripped from its pair: listening.

A year to the day.

The waters fell, the waters rose. Again. Boundaries breached. Again.

Imbalance seeking its own resolution. The atmosphere holds what it can. Then water finds its level. Pulling banks into beds, collapsing edges, toppling centuries of habit and habitation, exposing roots. These waters, misplaced and muddy, overwhelm our profuse, precious human lives.

At every turn, language distills a direct experience of the world into pre-digested sound bites, transmitting to me in a moment what took my ancestors an impossibly long time to discover for themselves. 

Language-based learning makes an incredible amount of understanding possible, and it is tempting to believe that this can replace our first-hand experience of building relationships with the living world. 

It cannot. 

When was the last time you sat still and knew another person, another creature, a place, or your own body, without the mediation of words?

How shall we reconcile the deep and sacred well of language with the terrifying speed at which it allows us to simplify and commodify the deep and sacred world?

Without stillness, there can be no knowing.

As the mountain of modernity erodes around us, we'll need the actors, and the public health workers, and the engineers, and the countless other people with varied skills and passions. But we'll need their efforts redirected. We won't need the money-making bits of us – the parts that we are told are “marketable” or “successful.” We’ll need the powerful parts, the messy parts, the parts that threaten the savage structures of legacy systems, and the parts that can salvage the best bits of the past and present to restructure and resystem and reworld. I think we will find that those very same parts are the parts that make us human.

By now, readers likely know that Juneteenth commemorates the day upon which exuberant freedom celebrations officially reached Galveston, Texas. On June 19, 1865, General Granger brought news of emancipation -- and the power to enforce the liberatory law -- to the hold-out state of Texas, which was the last jurisdiction in the 10 state Confederacy to surrender. Certainly, this was a change well worth celebrating. Certainly, the project of liberation -- a project that requires our collective collaboration -- is far from over.

If you’re not scrutinizing the phenomenon, you might think that being an audience member is a largely passive activity, with only punctuations of active participation: a laugh, an applause, perhaps a standing ovation. I think this gets the relationship all wrong. Performer and audience is much like the relationship between speaker and listener. Contributing well to an audience requires presence and bravery. You have to let the performance change you, like rock carved by the river. And in turn, the small flecks of rock change the river, giving part of herself to the ground below the river, joining more deeply with the river. The rock and the river’s give and take, push and pull, listen and speak, is a dance.

Some of my fondest memories include shimmying vigorously alongside my wackily gyrating friends. Those memories are so dear to me because I find an unabashed dance to be a sliver of humanity: the poetic juice of a person comes out in movement in such a sincere, colorful, flavorful series of twistings and flailings and side-steppings that I can’t help but learn something intimate and unique through observation. And there is no wrong way of dancing. All dance is emotion. And every emotion is valid.

If Governor Scott really wants to protect farmers, he would work with the legislature to phase out neonics over a very short period while also providing financial support, education, and and incentives to help farmers who had been relying upon them to transition away from high-input, extractive and degrading agri-industrial systems, towards lower energy, lower input, and more sustainable systems that maintain resilience and self and community based sufficiency.

All of our learning, our ability to change, our empathy and connection to other humans, and our ability to live a good life, comes from storytelling and listening. All of the skills we need to be resilient in a crisis we learn through story, and all the skills we have that we need to share with others we share through story. Story mediates our world and ourselves in ways that increase our adaptability and improve our world. It’s not complicated. It already lives in our brains, bodies, and minds and we can access it through a little practice and some remembering of the skills we all had as children. Once we get fluent in storytelling and story listening, we are able to adapt, learn, teach, share, understand, and cope in ways that will allow us to move with change and lend a hand when the people around us are not moving. The process is available to all of us; it transforms us and our lives and can save the world.

Few democracies in history have lasted. As Thomas Jefferson imagined the fledgling U.S. democracy in the 1780s, he feared that a disconnection from the land would lead to a dependence on social hierarchies, and thus an erosion of place-based, self-organizing practices that made democracies on all scales possible. “Those who labor the earth,” Jefferson mused, “are the chosen people of God.” Two centuries later, Cesar Chavez said, “we are not beasts of burden, agricultural implements, or rented slaves; we are men.” Chavez also understood that a healthy democracy came from a combination of (just) human labor on the land and a connection with environmental health. He understood the interconnectivity of human and more-than-human rights, stating that “kindness and compassion towards all living things is a mark of a civilized society.”

Like a mountain, our complex, and mostly monolithic modern civilization was formed slowly over time, and then all at once like a volcanic eruption. Even as parts of it continue to grow and complexify, other parts are being weathered away. Occasionally, large chunks are shaken loose. Reducing the height of our civilizational mountain is inevitable. No matter what, it will eventually stop growing altogether, and both the gradual and punctuated crumbling that is already happening will become more prominent. Even if we spend all our energy stacking up cairns to try to preserve the height, we will not match the pace of the weathering. What's more, staying high up on the mountain, attempting to construct cairns out of the rubble will not put us in a better, safe position. When things start to fall, how high up do you want to be?

Floored was the first word that came to my mind as I turned the last page. Months later, it is still the best single-word description of how I feel about Joe Fassler's debut novel: The Sky Was Ours, which was recently published by Penguin Random House. The book released at a moment when many Americans' attention was very much on the ground — coincident with the formation of student encampments on college campuses across the country, a historical moment when notions of liberation and generative, collective resistance are inextricably connected to the particular pieces of land, who can occupy them, and on what terms. Despite the necessary downward gaze of this spring, this soaring novel is already receiving well-deserved acclaim.

On the drive here, NPR told us about that a lethal heat wave in West Africa and provided anti-reassuring advice about how to reduce the risk of boiling your insides. I felt the vibe in the car shift and heard my 12 year old mutter, "Those who contributed the least face the worst." I beamed a little and felt my heart swell just a bit. Then I caught myself: Sure I'd rather they have a climate justice lens on the world than not... But I'd really rather that they didn't need to. My kids could do without their professor-mama giving them yet another lecture on climate breakdown, so I quipped about how I wouldn't mind a heatwave of the non-lethal variety and was longing for some spring sunshine.

I couldn’t devote my life to slapping bandaids on problems rather than stopping the bleeding. At first, I thought maybe it was just this field, but the more I looked, I realized this pattern existed in all the nooks and crannies of our culture, in almost every aspect of our lives. The way we work, learn, consume, and even help each other. It feels like some sort of vaudevillian sketch, or something out of Mr. Bean. The more we try to fix the problem we have created (or try to cover it up), the worse we make it, until it becomes an irreparable mess, that we would have done well to just stop trying to “help” by changing course from the very beginning.