Filmed by Jonathan Hiller: HillerVisual.com

CharlesEisenstein.org

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Video reposted from Youtube

Today, these trends have reached their extreme – but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.

Reposted from Ian McKenzie’s Website

Ian McKenzie: Almost exactly 7 years ago, I had just completed reading Charles Eisenstein’s new book ‘Sacred Economics,’ where he outlines the principles and practices of an economic system that is based on the story of Interdependence rather than the current story of Separation.

He covers topics like: negative interest currency, universal basic income, and the internalization of costs – complex things that while necessary to put a system into action, might cause the lay person glaze over.

Beyond the information, there is something else I recognized in Charles’ words that I believe is one of the reasons so many have been drawn to his work.

In a time when most modern people harbour a secret self-loathing at the seemingly endless destruction and hubris of their fellow humans, Charles embodies the frequency that “maybe we are not a mistake.”

Maybe humans are more than an biological accident.
Maybe, as the collective crises deepens, we are on the cusp of our initiation into planetary adulthood.
Maybe humans actually have a noble place in cosmos, not as the Lords of nature but as her Lover.

For this mysterious reason, after completing his book I reached out to Charles and asked if I could come shoot a short film. He agreed, and soon after, I joined him at his family home in Pennsylvania, staying for a week to record an interview, eventually ending up on Wall Street in the midst of the #Occupy movement.

The resulting film Sacred Economics (2012), has now been seen almost a million times. I have received countless comments of gratitude for how the film has fundamentally altered the trajectory of their lives.

And for some inexplicable reason, perhaps as mysterious as the first time I felt the call, I decided to craft a remix – not to replace the original, but to experiment with a richer soundscape and updated visuals that bring the necessity of the message into present day.

This new short Sacred Economics (2019) is offered once again as a gift to the global community, with gratitude from my Patreon supporters.

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That ambition began to disintegrate soon after, when after years of labor The Ascent of Humanity found no takers in the publishing world. So I self-published, still hoping that word-of-mouth would propel it to best-seller status. That would show all those publishers! I remember looking at the sales numbers in August 2007 – its fifth month, about the time it should have been gaining momentum. Total sales that month: five copies. Around the same time I was evicted from my apartment (having pinned all my hopes and income on the book) and spent the next half year living temporarily in other people’s houses, children in tow.

It was a painful yet beautiful clarifying experience that asked me, “Why are you doing this work? Is it because you hope to become a celebrated intellectual? Or do you really care about serving the healing of the world?” The experience of failure revealed my secret hopes and motivations.

I had to admit there was some of both motivations, self and service. OK, well, a lot of both. I realized I had to let go of the first motive, or it would occlude the second. Around that time I had a vision of a spiritual being that came to me and said, “Charles, is it really your wish that the work you do fulfill its potential and exercise its right role in the evolution of all things?”

“Yes,” I said, “that is my wish.”

“OK then,” said the being. “I can make that happen, but you will have to pay a price. The price is that you will never be recognized for your role. The story you are speaking will change the world, but you will never get credit for it. You will never get wealth, fame, or prestige. Do you agree to pay that price?”

I tried to worm my way out of it, but the being was unyielding. If it was going to be either-or, how could I live with myself knowing in my heart of hearts I’d betrayed my purpose? So I consented to its offer.

Of course, time would tell that it wasn’t actually either-or. What was important in that clarifying moment was that I declare my ultimate loyalty. Once that happened, recognition and prestige might or might not come as a byproduct, but it wouldn’t be the goal. After all, the work I do isn’t “my” work. These are ideas whose time has come and they need capable scribes. Our true wages in life consist of the satisfaction we get from a job well done. Aside from that, well, the rain falls on the just and unjust alike.

That was part one of the disintegration of my ambition. The first part was the disintegration of personal ambition. The second part was the disintegration of the ambition to do big things to change the world. I began to understand that our concepts of big impact versus small impact are part of what needs to be healed. Our culture validates and celebrates those who are out there with big platforms speaking to millions of people, while ignoring those who do humble, quiet work, taking care of just one sick person, one child, or one small place on this earth.

When I meet one of these people, I know that their impact doesn’t depend on their kind action going viral on the internet and reaching millions of people. Even if no one ever knows and no one ever thanks them for taking in that old woman with dementia and sacrificing a normal life to care for her, that choice sends ripples outward through the fabric of causality. On a five hundred or five thousand year timescale, the impact is no smaller than anything a President does.

Certain choices feel significant to us, unreasonably. The heart calls us to actions that the mind cannot justify in the face of global problems. The logic of bigness can drag us into feelings of irrelevance, leading us to project importance onto the people we see on our screens. But knowing how much harm has been done by those very people in the name of bettering the world, I became wary of playing that game.

The calculating mind thinks that just helping one person has a smaller impact on the world than helping a thousand. It wants to scale up, to get big. That is not necessary in a different causal logic, the logic that knows, “God sees everything,” or the logic of morphic resonance that knows that any change that happens in one place creates a field that allows the same kind of change to happen elsewhere. Acts of kindness strengthen the field of kindness, acts of love strengthen the field of love, acts of hate strengthen the field of hate.

Nor is scaling up necessary when we trust that the tasks life sets before us are part of a larger tapestry, woven by an intelligence that puts us in exactly the right place at the right time.

I attended a funeral recently for a central Pennsylvania farmer, Roy Brubaker, among several hundred mourners. One of the testimonials came from a young farmer who said something like this: “Roy is the one who taught me what success really is. Success is having the capacity to always be there for your neighbors. Any time someone called with a problem, Roy would put down what he was doing and be right over to help.”

This farmer had been Roy’s intern. When he went into business for himself and became Roy’s competitor, Roy helped him along with advice and material aid, and even announced his new competitor’s farm share program to his own mailing list. At the end of his speech, the young farmer said, “I used to think Roy was able to help so many people because he was a successful farmer who had it made. But now I think he was probably more like me, with fifty vegetable crops all crying for attention and a million things to do. He was there for people anyway.”

Roy didn’t wait until he had it made to start being generous.

This is the kind of person that holds the world together. On a practical level, they are the reason society hangs together despite its pervasive injustice, poverty, trauma, and so on. They also anchor the field of love that helps the rest of us serve our purpose rather than our personal ambition.

As I run into more such people and hear their stories, I realize that I don’t need to worry about the size of my audience or about reaching “people of influence.” My job is just to do my work with as much love and sincerity as I can. I can trust that the right people will read it. I am awed and humbled by people like Roy whom I meet in my travels and in my community. They live in service, in love, with great faith and courage, and unlike me they don’t have thousands of people telling them how important their work is. In fact, quite often the system and culture we live in discourages them, telling them that they are foolish, naïve, irresponsible, impractical, and giving them little financial reward. How many times have you been told a life dedicated to beauty or nurture or healing is unrealistic? Maybe after everything on your farm is all ship-shape, maybe after you are personally secure with a solid career and secure investments, maybe then you can afford a little generosity. So I admire people who are generous first, generous with their precious lives. They are my teachers. They are the ones who have eroded my ambition to make it big – even with the excuse of serving the cause.

I am reminded of a Zen teaching story in which the Zen master is approached by a messenger from the emperor. “The emperor has heard of your teaching and wants you to come to court to be the official imperial teacher.”

The Zen master declined the invitation.

A year later the invitation was repeated. This time the master agreed to come. When asked why, he said, “When I first got the invitation, I knew I wasn’t ready because I felt the stirring of excitement. I thought this would be a great chance to spread the Dharma throughout the realm. Then I realized that this ambition, which sees one student as more important than another, disqualified me from being his teacher. I had to wait until I could see the emperor as I would any other person.”

Thanks to the humble people who hold the world together, I am learning no longer to favor the emperor over any other person. What guides me is a certain feeling of resonance, curiosity, or rightness.

Ironically, having lost my careerist ambitions, this year Oprah Winfrey invited me to tape an interview with her for (even more ironically) the show Super Soul Sunday. Five years ago my heart would have been thumping with excitement at the prospect of making it big, but now the feeling was one of curiosity and adventure. From the God’s-eye perspective, was that hour to be more important than the hour I spent with a friend in need? Or the hour you spent taking a stranger to the emergency room?

Credit: author’s own

Yet my response was an immediate yes, accompanied by feelings of wonderment that my world was intersecting with hers. You see, Oprah occupies nearly a different universe from my own countercultural fringe. Could it be, I think with leaping heart, that the gulf between our worlds is narrowing? That the ideas I serve and the consciousness I speak to are ready to penetrate the mainstream?

I think the conversation with Oprah is a marker of changing times. I was amazed that someone in her position would even take notice of my writing, since it lies quite outside any familiar discourse within the mainstream. (At least I’ve never seen anything in mainstream media remotely similar to my election article that attracted her attention.) Our meeting is perhaps a sign that our country’s familiar, polarized social discourse is broken, and that her people – the vast and fairly mainstream audience she serves – are willing to look outside it.

By this I do not mean to diminish her extraordinary personal qualities. I experienced her as astute, perceptive, sincere, expansive, and even humble, a master of her art. But I think her reaching out reflects more than these personal qualities.

I sometimes see myself as a kind of receiving antenna for information that a certain segment of humanity is asking for. A use has been found for the weird kid in high school! On a much larger scale, Oprah is something akin to that as well: not just herself, she is an avatar of the collective mind. Deeply attuned to her audience, when she brings something into their view it is probably because she knows they are ready to see it.

During our conversation I sometimes had the feeling that she personally would have liked to geek out and dive much deeper, but that she disciplined herself to remain the antenna of her audience and stay within the format of the program, which doesn’t lend itself to my usual long disquisitions. I meanwhile was trying to frame ideas for a mainstream audience that I expect isn’t familiar with some of my basic operating concepts. Our conversation felt a bit awkward at times, groping for a structure, as if we were trying to furnish a very large house with a motley mix of beautiful but odd furniture. Nonetheless I think we created a habitable enough corner to welcome people into a new perspective.

In the years since my encounter with the spiritual being, I’ve become comfortable in the cultural fringes where my work has found its home. I have scaled back on traveling and speaking in order to spend more time with my precious loved ones and to connect with the source of knowledge in nature, silence, and intimate connections. I’m with my family at my brother’s farm right now, doing farm labor part of the day and writing during the other part. The flurry of publicity that might follow the Oprah appearance (or might not – it could just be a blip on the radar) poses me with another question, the complement of the one my initial “failure” posed. If it serves the work, am I willing to sacrifice the reclusiveness I am coming to love? If it serves, am I willing to be on other programs where the host may not be as gracious as Oprah? Am I willing to be more of a public figure and deal with the attendant projections, positive and negative? Do I have the strength to remember who the real super souls are – the Roy Brubakers, the dolphin rescuers, the hospice workers, the care givers, the peace witnesses, the unpaid healers, the humble grandfathers taking a child berry-picking, the single moms struggling to hold it all together not imagining that their monumental efforts at patience have an impact on the whole world?

Let me be honest with you: if I hadn’t been facing the total collapse of my success fantasies already, I probably wouldn’t have accepted the spiritual being’s offer. And by the way, it is an offer that is constantly renewed. Every day we are asked, “What will you serve?” I had not the strength on my own to say yes to a life of service. Nor do I now, save for the help I receive from others who hold the field, the people who humble me every day with their generosity, sincerity, and selflessness. To the extent I am effective at what I do, it is because of you.

If I am right that my Oprah appearance is a marker (however small) of the unraveling of once-dominant worldviews, then it only happened because the emerging worldview I speak for is being held so strongly now by so many. Take it then as an encouraging sign. Whether or not it proves to be a breakthrough moment for the concepts of empathy and interbeing we discussed, it suggests that they are coming closer toward consensus reality. We will not be alone here much longer. I thank all who have held the field of knowledge I speak from, who believe my words even more than I do myself, and who therefore uphold me in the work that upholds you. That is how we transition from the Age of Separation to the age of We Need Each Other.

Photo by The Shopping Sherpa

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“This is an opportunity to take a drink from the wellspring of knowledge offered by people who are living a new normal.”-Charles Eisenstein, visionary and conference keynote speake

The European Ecovillage Conference’s vibrant programme is brought alive by co-creators offering talks, workshops, and interactive sessions centered on the theme “Conscious Happiness – Living The Future Today: Solidarity, Resilience, Hope.” Highlights will include keynote addresses by acclaimed speakers, authors and activists Charles Eisenstein and Helena Norberg-Hodge, who will engage some of the great challenges of our time – and invite participants to explore solutions offered by the ecovillage movement.

Norberg-Hodge, creator of “The Economics of Happiness” notes, “There’s been a really dramatic [cultural] shift, just in the last couple of years, and yet it needs more awareness. It’s the consciousness that’s missing…. There is this huge need for global communication and interaction… We need that flowering of connections which we can start with right now at home but also reach out across internationally into a global movement. ”

The Global Ecovillage Network is a membership-based coalition of Ecovillages, or intentional communities, that holistically integrate ecological, economic, social and cultural sustainability into regenerative living models. The GEN Europe network connects, sustains and diffuses the work of ecovillage and communities across Europe, within ecovillage communities and also to those who are curious to learn about the movement. Solidarity During the 5 day conference, participants will explore a particularly timely series of events centred around our theme of solidarity.

At a time of great change and political divisiveness, there is an urgent need to address hardships with insights gained from living intentionally together. Norberg-Hodge describes a part of the work of solidarity this way: “Let’s get away from this idea that we don’t need anybody. We do need others. Let’s not be afraid to express that to one another.”

Workshops exploring the Eroles residential in Grenada, which put migrants at the centre of community co-creation, and the Sustainer, which combines permaculture principles and ecovillage innovation to build an autonomous shelter for those who’ve had to flee their homes, will showcase some of the many ways in which ecovillages are acting in solidarity around Europe. Resilience Personal and collective resilience in the face of changing climate, cultural upheaval, and spiritual emptiness is a key theme of many of our workshops and exhibits.

Workshop leader and evolutionary biologist Bjorn Grinde describes how ecovillages meet a biological need that increases our happiness and well-being: “Humans are adapted to live in tribal settings. Research shows people need to find meaning in these [smaller] units. For the future of the world, finding a meaning of life in a setting of ecological balance is even better because that will point towards a way of living that benefits future society.”

The Ecovillage Sustainable Technology Exposition will feature open source solutions for reducing carbon emissions and producing energy efficient systems, many demonstrated and built on site by their ecovillage inventors. Conference participants will learn how to build simple wind turbines or try out superefficient energy-saving cookware.

Exploring other aspects of resilience, workshop leaders from Spain, Sweden, Holland and beyond consider our human relationships and spiritual development, from addressing “the shadows” in our lives to learning innovative conflict resolution strategies to inviting attendees to try out organizational structures used in ecovillages. The conference will build an atmosphere that offers participants hope and inspiration. As Eisenstein, author of “The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible”, puts it, “hope is the feeling when you glimpse a real possibility. Hope is what comes when you have an experience of what’s possible in the future, even if you don’t know how to get there. This is an opportunity to take a drink from the wellspring of knowledge offered by people who are living a new normal.” Young people help us see the path to our collective future, and therefore our conference team is supported by an international team of young volunteers from across Europe. The conference will also feature a children’s festival and provide people of all ages a chance to connect across generations and cultures to create new friendships.

In addition to workshops, participants can expect opportunities to celebrate and practice healing arts, interactive events like a living map of ecovillages across Europe, and plenty of time to relax. The conference is a family-friendly drug and alcohol free experience, offering managed campsites with outdoor facilities and full vegetarian catering.

“A more beautiful world IS possible… and you will experience a part of it during the gathering at Ӓngsbacka” welcomes Ewa Jacobsson of Ӓngsbacka.

About the conference: http://www.angsbacka.se/GEN

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1334767663264375/

General enquiry: conference@gen-europe.org

Press contact: For interviews in English and Italian: Evan Welkin +39 334 259 0522, pr@gen-europe.org

In Swedish: Annette Ericsdotter Bettaieb, annette@tgim.se, + 46 70 777 91 00

GEN–  Global Ecovillage Network.  The Global Ecovillage Network was founded 20 years ago and represents over 100 countries in the 5 continents. GEN-Europe is a network that connects, sustains and diffuses the work of ecovillages and communities. The network offers consulting and coordination for member communities across Europe as well as supporting projects of interdependence, including an international youth exchange program, a community-sponsored forced migration relief project, and advocacy in grassroots climate change networks. GEN-Europe has representation in Brussels under the umbrella of ECOLISE, together with other intercontinental networks; also, it has a consultative status at the UN for educational material for 10 years.

Ängsbacka, outside Karlstad in Sweden, is a vital meeting place for people who want to live a more conscious life, live from the heart and care for our planet. Since 1997 thousands of people have been touched by the warm, open, loving atmosphere during workshops, festivals and visits at Ängsbacka.

Ängsbacka is a full member of GEN Europe since 2016.

“A more beautiful world IS possible… and you will experience a part of it during the gathering at Ӓngsbacka” welcomes Ewa Jacobsson of Ӓngsbacka.

#ecovillages #community #beautifulalternatives #innovativesolutions #togetherwerise

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Photo by TEDxEQChCh

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“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Alnoor Ladha: Last week, on February 22, 2017, water protectors at the Oceti Sakowin camp, the primary camp of Standing Rock, were evicted by the Army Corps of Engineers in a military style takeover. A peaceful resistance that began with a sacred fire lit on April 1, 2016, ended in a blaze as some of the protectors, in a final act of defiance, set some of the camp’s structures on fire.

The millions of people around the world who have stood in solidarity and empathy with Standing Rock now stand in disbelief and grief, but the forced closure of the encampment is simply the latest chapter in a violent, 500-year-old history of colonization against the First Nations. It is also the latest chapter in the battle between an extractive capitalist model and the possibility of a post-capitalist world.

Of course, the ongoing struggle will not go down in the flames at Oceti Sakowin. We should take this opportunity to remember the enduring lessons of this movement, and prepare ourselves for what is to come next.

1. There is a global convergence of movements

When I visited Standing Rock in October 2016, it struck me that this was the most diverse political gathering I’d ever seen. Over 300 North American tribes had came together for the first time in history. Standing alongside them were over 100 Indigenous communities from all over the globe. A contingent from the Sami people, the Indigenous peoples of Scandinavia, had traversed the Atlantic to show their support the day I arrived. They were joined by black bloc anarchists, New Age spiritualists, traditional environmentalists, union organizers and ordinary Americans who have never attended a protest.

The media has characterized Standing Rock as a one-off protest against a pipeline in North Dakota. But the reality is that the various movements from around the world including the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, the Pink Tide in Latin America, the landless people’s movement from India, the anti-austerity movement in Europe, the global Occupy movement, and the countless “awakenings” spreading across the African continent are uniting as expressions of the same impulse: a belief that the neoliberal capitalist system has failed the majority of humanity and a new world is emerging.

2. A more holistic activism is emerging

With its sacred fire, daily prayers and water ceremonies, Standing Rock has helped to reanimate the sacred aspect of activism. We are seeing a shift from resistance to resistance and renewal simultaneously. Progressive movements which once internalized the Neitzchean dictum that “God is dead” are now evolving their positions. As the anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey states: “As Capital triumphs over the Social as against all spiritualities, spirituality itself finds itself realigned with revolution^.”There is a shift to embracing a more holistic activism that transcends traditional Cartesian duality and calls upon greater forces. Cedric Goodhouse, an elder at Standing Rock put it simply, saying: “We are governed by prayer.”

The particular ways in which Standing Rock embodied non-violent direct action has given many activists a new faith in the possibility of a more sacred activism. I stood with dozens of water protectors when they prayed on water in front of Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) engineers while they were laying down oil pipeline. The very act of seeing Indigenous elders praying on water said more about the implications of an extractive pipeline than any linear argument. They dropped their tools not only because they wanted to avoid confrontation, but because somehow they understood they were on the wrong side of the moral calculus.

The author Charles Eisenstein reminds us of a powerful insight about sacred activism that has been embodied in Standing Rock: “We need to confront an unjust, ecocidal system. Each time we do we will receive an invitation to give in to the dark side and hate ‘the deplorables.’ We must not shy away from those confrontations. Instead, we can engage them empowered by the inner mantra that my friend Pancho Ramos-Stierle uses in confrontations with his jailers: ‘Brother, your soul is too beautiful to be doing this work.’ If we can stare hate in the face and never waver from that knowledge, we will access inexhaustible tools of creative engagement, and hold a compelling invitation to the haters to fulfill their beauty.”

3. Occupation of space is a critical tactic

Even before Occupy there has been a renaissance in the political understanding of the value of place and space. The battlegrounds between the corporate/state nexus and people’s movements are physical realms: the places where resources are being extracted, water is being polluted and capitalist interests are expanding through what Marxist geographer, David Harvey, calls “accumulation by dispossession.”

The occupation of space creates a physical spectacle that forces the corporate media to tell the stories it would otherwise like to ignore. It creates networks of solidarity and deep relationships that span beyond the time and space of the occupation. It creates inter-generational transfers-of-knowledge, both politically and spiritually. It weaves the connective tissue for the continued resistance against corporate (and other imperialist) power.

Standing Rock will be remembered by the thousands of activists who braved blizzards to sleep in tipis, who cooked food together in the communal kitchens, and celebrated in song and ceremony with tribal elders around the sacred fire. As the activist Reverend Billy Talen recently stated: “Zuccotti Park and the stretch of sidewalk in front of the Ferguson police department and the meadow near the Sacred Stone… these three places are lived in. Here is where activists cared for each other and shared food, clothing and medicine. The force that upsets entrenched power the most is this compassionate living, this community in plain sight.”

4. We are Nature protecting itself

Part of the on-going colonial legacy of North America is a battle between the mute materialism of capitalism that seeks to dominate nature and the symbiotic approach of Indigenous thought that sees Nature as alive, and sees human beings as playing a central role in the evolution and stewardship of the broader whole. It is this very worldview that rationalists derisively call “animist” and that continues to confound the utility maximization ideals of modern thought.

Indigenous lands are increasingly going to be a battleground not only for resource extraction, but ideology itself. Although Indigenous peoples represent about 4% of the world’s population they live on and protect 22% of the Earth’s surface. Critically, the land inhabited by Indigenous peoples holds the remaining 80% of the planet’s biodiversity.

It is no coincidence that ETP moved away from its early proposal to have the DAPL project cross the Missouri river just north of Bismarck, a primarily white city, to the Standing Rock area inhabited by the Sioux tribe.

During COP 21 in Paris, Indigenous youth groups carried banners that read: “We are Nature protecting itself.” The idea that we are not protestors, but protectors of the sacred is a central theme that resonates throughout the world.

In a powerful article on the Sacred Stone blog, the camp’s founder Ladonna Bravebull Allard said: “This movement is not just about a pipeline. We are not fighting for a reroute, or a better process in the white man’s courts. We are fighting for our rights as the Indigenous peoples of this land; we are fighting for our liberation, and the liberation of Unci Maka, Mother Earth. We want every last oil and gas pipe removed from her body. We want healing. We want clean water. We want to determine our own future.”

These ideals are not just Indigenous ideals; they are ideals linked with our very survival as a species. In a world of catastrophic climate change, protecting the sacred must be the mantra of all activists and concerned citizens.

5. There is a common antagonist

Although the various social movements around the world are portrayed as separate incidents that are particular to their local context, there is a growing awareness among movements themselves that we are uniting against the same antagonist: the deadly logic of late-stage capitalism.

Whether one is fighting for land rights in India or tax justice in Kenya or to stop a pipeline in the US, the ‘enemy’ is the same: a cannibalistic global economy that requires perpetual extraction, violence, oppression, in the service of GDP growth, which in turn, benefits a tiny elite at the expense of the world’s majority.

There is a Algonquin word, wetiko, that refers to a cannibalistic spirit that consumes the heart of man. It was a common term used when the First Nations of North America initially interacted with the Western European colonialists. The spirit of wetiko, like many memetic thought-forms, has mutated and evolved, and has now become the animating force of the global capitalist system. We are not just fighting a pipeline; we are fighting the wetiko spirit that has taken hold of our planet like invisible architecture.

What Standing Rock achieved so beautifully was to provide this broader context, to ladder up a local struggle for clean water to the struggle against the forces of wetiko itself. Wetikois inherently anti-life. And what we are all fighting for is a new system that recognizes our interdependence with the Earth and with each other, and that allows our highest selves to flourish.

The sacred fire at Standing Rock may now be smoldering but it’s reverberations are only beginning to be felt. As Julian Brave NoiseCat poignantly states in his reflections on the impact of this historical movement: “They have lit a fire on the prairie in the heart of America as a symbol of their resistance, a movement that stands for something that is undoubtedly right: water that sustains life, and land that gave birth to people.”

This is the enduring power of Standing Rock. It has created inextinguishable hope, activated our historical memory and created new forms of power by the profound act of starting a global movement from a single sacred fire. The fires of Standing Rock are illuminating the transition that lies ahead and the new society that is emerging from its ashes.

Alnoor Ladha is the Executive Director of The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, writers, and researchers dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and climate change. He is also a board member of Greenpeace International USA.

Cross-posted from Common Dreams

Photo by Dark Sevier

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From the Shownotes to the Podcast

The Fertile Ground of Bewilderment was the title of a speech I gave at St. James Church in London. I’m sharing it with you all because it was such a high-energy event and I ventured into territory I haven’t brought into public speaking before. I even went a little into the election here, which portends our own moment of bewilderment as long-established certainties disintegrate. Anyway, there was a kind of magic in the air that evening. The church was packed with people of all ages and races. The light in people’s eyes and the emotion on their faces was definitely not consistent with the stereotype of repressed British people!

Bewilderment. A very bad thing if it is a diversion from what you know to do. But when the honest truth is that you don’t know, then to admit that and to succumb to the unknowing is a necessary stage of the process of letting in a new understanding. I think our civilization is approaching this moment of humility. We are obviously not quite there yet though!

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For me it came at about the age of seven or eight, when I was outside with my father watching a large flock of starlings fly past. “That’s a big flock of birds,” I said.

My father told me then about the passenger pigeon, whose flocks once filled the skies, so vast that they stretched from horizon to horizon for days on end. “They are extinct now,” he told me. “People would just point their guns to the sky and shoot randomly, and the pigeons would fall. Now there aren’t any left.” Of course, I’d known about the dinosaurs before then, but that was the first time I really understood what the word “extinct” means.

I cried in my bed that night, and many nights thereafter. That was when I still knew how to cry – a capacity that, once extinguished through the brutality of teenage boyhood in the 1980s, was nearly as hard to resuscitate as it would be to bring the passenger pigeon back to Earth.

Species extinction did not end with the 19th century. The fate of the passenger pigeon foreshadowed the calamity that is now overtaking all life on this planet, a calamity that has left none of us untouched. I recently made the acquaintance of a farmer here in North Carolina, I’ll call him Mike, a man of the earth whose family has been here for three hundred years. His thick accent, increasingly rare in this age of mass media-induced linguistic homogenization, suggested conservative “Southern values.” Indeed, he was full of bitterness, though not against the usual racial or liberal suspects; instead he launched into a tirade about the guvmint, chemtrails, the banks, the “sheeple,” the 9-11 conspiracy, and so on. “We the people have got to rise up and smash them,” he said, but it was leaden despair, not revolutionary fervor, that colored his voice.

Tentatively, I broached the idea that the perpetrators of these crimes are themselves imprisoned in a world-story in which everything they do is necessary, right, and justified; and that we join them there when we adopt the paradigm of conquering evil through superior force. That is precisely what motivates the technologies of control, whether social, medical, material, or political, wielded by those we would overthrow. Besides, I said, if it comes down to a war to overthrow the tyrants, if it comes down to a contest of force, then we are doomed. They are the masters of war. They have the weapons: the guns, the bombs, the money, the surveillance state, the media, and the political machinery. If there is hope, there must be another way.

Perhaps this is why so many seasoned activists succumb to despair after decades of struggle. Dear reader, do you think we can beat the military-industrial-financial-agricultural-pharmaceutical-NGO-educational-political complex1 at its own game? In this book I will describe how the modern environmental movement, and most especially the climate change movement, has attempted just that, not only risking defeat but also quite often worsening the situation even in its victories. Climate change is calling us to a deeper kind of revolution, a different kind of revolution, a revolution that will be unstoppable.

Mike wasn’t understanding me. He is an intelligent man (as most farmers are), but it was as if something had possessed him; no matter what I said, he would pick up on one or two cue words to pour forth more bitterness. Obviously, I wasn’t going to “defeat the enemy” by force of intellect, enacting the very same paradigm I was critiquing. When I saw what was happening, I stopped talking and listened. I listened, not so much on a conceptual level, but to the voice beneath the words and to all that voice carried. Finally I asked him the same question I am asking you: “What made you into an environmentalist?”

That is when the anger and bitterness gave way to grief. Mike told me about the ponds and streams and wild lands that he hunted and fished and swam and roamed in his childhood, and how every single one of them had been destroyed by development: cordoned off, no-trespassed, filled in, cut down, paved over, and built up.

In other words, he became an environmentalist in the same way that I did, and, I am willing to guess, the same way you did. He became an environmentalist through experiences of beauty and grief.

“Would the guys ordering the chemtrails do it, if they could feel what you are feeling now?” I asked.

“No. They wouldn’t be able to do it.”

* * *

It has been quite a process, my foray into writing a new book. I solicited support on Patreon (to crowdfund my writing sabbatical) and was moved by how many people responded. But then I felt constrained to produce something tangible, right away, otherwise I’d be letting them down. I felt like a schoolboy with an assignment due. Predictably, what I wrote in those circumstances was garbage. Then the fatigue hit me — the fatigue built up from years of intense travel and speaking. I descended into a surrendered space and basically let go of the book. It was only then that the material I’ve excerpted above came to me. The book, whose working title is “The Revolution is Love,” aims to bridge the spiritual and political dimensions of environmentalism, environmental justice, and particularly climate change.

Even when I gave up on the book, it didn’t give up on me, and neither did my supporters near and far.

At this point, I’m taking it slow, conserving and rebuilding, and trusting the writing process. That’s easy when the material is flowing; harder when that process means to write nothing for days or weeks, but rather to read, meditate, be with children, nourish my health… I’m getting over the habit of always needing to be producing something measurable. (That’s the basis of the current economic paradigm, after all, which drives the wrecking of the planet.) More and more of the quantifiable, less and less of the sacred. This time I’m taking another approach. I hope it is working. I think the book will have a lot of stories, weaving back and forth between personal and political, spiritual and systems levels.

I want to thank everyone who follows my blog and my podcasts.  That support is really important. You have been giving all along, spreading the work I do and the ideas which all of us serve.

Photo by tonnoro

The post The Revolution is Love appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article first appeared in Yes! Magazine (August 20, 2015)

The legitimacy of a given social order rests on the legitimacy of its debts. Even in ancient times this was so. In traditional cultures, debt in a broad sense—gifts to be reciprocated, memories of help rendered, obligations not yet fulfilled—was a glue that held society together. Everybody at one time or another owed something to someone else. Repayment of debt was inseparable from the meeting of social obligations; it resonated with the principles of fairness and gratitude.

The moral associations of making good on one’s debts are still with us today, informing the logic of austerity as well as the legal code. A good country, or a good person, is supposed to make every effort to repay debts. Accordingly, if a country like Jamaica or Greece, or a municipality like Baltimore or Detroit, has insufficient revenue to make its debt payments, it is morally compelled to privatize public assets, slash pensions and salaries, liquidate natural resources, and cut public services so it can use the savings to pay creditors. Such a prescription takes for granted the legitimacy of its debts.

Today a burgeoning debt resistance movement draws from the realization that many of these debts are not fair. Most obviously unfair are loans involving illegal or deceptive practices—the kind that were rampant in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis. From sneaky balloon interest hikes on mortgages, to loans deliberately made to unqualified borrowers, to incomprehensible financial products peddled to local governments that were kept ignorant about their risks, these practices resulted in billions of dollars of extra costs for citizens and public institutions alike.

A movement is arising to challenge these debts. In Europe, the International Citizen debt Audit Network (ICAN) promotes “citizen debt audits,” in which activists examine the books of municipalities and other public institutions to determine which debts were incurred through fraudulent, unjust, or illegal means. They then try to persuade the government or institution to contest or renegotiate those debts. In 2012, towns in France declared they would refuse to pay part of their debt obligations to the bailed-out bank Dexia, claiming its deceptive practices resulted in interest rate jumps to as high as 13 percent. Meanwhile, in the United States, the city of Baltimore filed a class-action lawsuit to recover losses incurred through the Libor rate-fixing scandal, losses that could amount to billions of dollars.

And Libor is just the tip of the iceberg. In a time of rampant financial lawbreaking, who knows what citizen audits might uncover? Furthermore, at a time when the law itself is so subject to manipulation by financial interests, why should resistance be limited to debts that involved lawbreaking? After all, the 2008 crash resulted from a deep systemic corruption in which “risky” derivative products turned out to be risk-free—not on their own merits, but because of government and Federal Reserve bailouts that amounted to a de facto guarantee.

The perpetrators of these “financial instruments of mass destruction” (as Warren Buffett labeled them) were rewarded while homeowners, other borrowers, and taxpayers were left with collapsed asset values and higher debts.

Continue reading the article here.

Illustration by Steve Brodner.

The post “Don’t Owe. Won’t Pay.” Everything You’ve Been Told About Debt Is Wrong appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In an interview recently, Aftab Omer observed that I seem hesitant to describe Sacred Economics as a post-capitalist economic vision. I replied that I am not talking about the end of capitalism, bur rather a transformation in the nature of capital, so that capitalism no longer bears the social dynamics to which we are accustomed.

“If we define capitalism as the private ownership of the means of production, and post-capitalism as ending that private ownership, we are still reifying “ownership” or property as an absolute category. But in fact, ownership like money is nothing but a social agreement, a system by which society allocates certain exclusive rights to decide how capital is used.”

These might seem like technical reforms that leave the fact of ownership of the means of production unchanged, but actually they change what “ownership” means. When we understand that property is a fluid concept, a broad label we give to a complicated set of social agreements, then it becomes hard to say what is capitalism and what is not. 

At bottom, the blurriness of the concept of ownership implicates the blurriness of the concept of the owner. Who, or what, owns property? The 17th-century thinkers that developed the philosophical foundations of property law (and law in general), Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, Hutcheson, etc., despite their differences, all pretty much took for granted a world of separate individuals giving consent, entering into contracts, and making free-willed moral choices. It is from this assumption that libertarian ideas about the sanctity of property and the sanctity of contract are born, along with the irreconcilable difficulties that arise in integrating these with the good of the body politic. Private property (its presence or absence as an absolute category) goes hand in hand with the separate self. A system grounded in the understanding of our inter-existence, in the fluid and fractal co-construction of self and society, no longer takes ownership as a well-defined category. The terms capitalist, socialist, post-capitalist, and so forth, because they draw on ownership as an elemental concept, are therefore a little bit obsolete.  

Originally posted in charleseisenstein.net

The post Post Capitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.