Boundless Roots Best Reads, June 2020
Below we share with you some of the articles, reports and research papers the Boundless Roots community and networks have been picking up in the world during the last few weeks.
Our 3 top reads (and a bonus video!)
Intersectional Environmentalist’ Platform Launches to Dismantle Racism in the Climate Movement
This article from Greenmatters interviews Leah Thomas (Instagram: @GreenGirlLeah) who shared a post in May 2020, defining intersectional environmentalism. Within a few weeks, the post has helped start an important conversation.
Leah shares her thoughts on why she believes environmentalism should be an intersectional movement:
- She was inspired by intersectional feminism and felt if her feminism is intersectional, her environmentalism should also be intersectional.
- She feels that those who are unclear about why environmentalism is an intersectional justice issue are likely people who have the privilege to not have to see the connections.
- She wanted to be able to reach out to environmentalists and extend the olive branch and says, “You have a part in this movement, you have a responsibility as environmentalists…to get involved to make sure both people and the planet are being protected.”
Leah also shares more about her work since the post trended on Instagram:
- Along with her two business partners, she has built the Intersectional Environmentalist website which provides activists with free resources.
- So far, the communities listed are Black, Latinx, U.S. Indigenous, LGBTQ2S+, South Asian, and allies.
- Each community page has resources to help people in that community become better intersectional environmentalists.
Microsolidarity: #1 Proposal
In late 2018, Richard D. Bartlett published a proposal to start a “microsolidarity” group — a small mutual aid community for people to do a kind of personal development, in good company, for social benefit. Since then, an open research network has been gradually self-organising around this concept and these practices.
He lays out a proposal with fairly simple yet powerful design elements that are a result of his 7 years of thinking & doing other similar work. The following are the design criteria for action amid the climate collapse:
- We need enormous courage to persist without a guarantee of a positive outcome.
- We need resilient methods for making meaning in the midst of chaos.
- People with life-supporting values need to grow our power to influence the distribution of resources.
- Since the core of this bio/socio/psycho/spiritual collapse is a metacrisis of relationship — the response must be relational first.
He continues with laying down a theory of Groups and Groups of Groups:
- Defining the ‘Self’ as a tight network of overlapping identities who share custody of this body we call Me.
- Defining a ‘Dyad’ as a relationship of two, which can only be in one of two states: Domination or Partnership. Domination relationships are the root of all injustice, and partnership relationships are the root of all freedom.
- Defining a ‘Crew’ as a group that is small enough to fit around a single dinner table, around 3–8 people. This is about the same size as a nuclear family, but without the parent-child power dynamics.
- Defining a ‘Congregation’ with a size somewhere between 30 and 200 people: small enough that most of the members can know each other’s name, big enough to support many Crews to coalesce.
- Defining the crowd as all human groups bigger than congregations.
- Recognising that contemporary neoliberal urban westernised society is mostly designed for Selves and Crowds — there’s a little space for Dyads, and almost no room for Crews and Congregations.
Crews are often rendered dysfunctional because we’re infected with individualism which means we lack the techniques, behaviours, language, beliefs, ideas, tools, and nuanced values required to thrive in multiplicity. He suggests following sequence to crystallise new crews:
- Start a Congregation localised to one geographic region.
- Establish psychological safety, a space where all the parts of your networked Self are welcome to show up.
- Respond to the needs in the group and attempt to move from emotional intimacy towards building economic solidarity.
- Engage in some versions of the reciprocity game as recommended to build trust.
There are some additional attributes of the micro solidarity proposal:
- Exclusion: The more permissive your entry criteria, the more you include people whose behaviour excludes others. Ask early “which people should we exclude?”
- Not for profit but with profit: Be in community with people who are growing their financial resilience and co-investing in each others’ commons-building companies.
- Do better than good: Outcompete individualistic consumerism with micro solidarity.
- Decentralised governance
- Design for smallness: A high trust group can be very coherent and effective even with very low levels of explicit agreement about state, direction and norms.
COVID-19, Climate Change, and Culture
Debashish Munshi and Priya Kurian, both Professors at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, reflect on what world leaders and the media should learn from the current COVID-19 pandemic in this blog.
They argue for a greater need for political leadership and media to sharpen their focus on climate change. They highlight that climate change conversations largely constitute a dominant technical discourse that remains out of touch with people’s subjective realities and hence can only ever be partially effective.
They make the case for a culture-centred framework of public engagement on climate change which calls for factoring in:
- The values and beliefs of different groups of people;
- The specific contexts of the places they live in;
- The dynamics of power they negotiate;
- And the narratives that guide the actions they take.
Talking about the inequalities brought forward as a consequence of COVID-19, they shine a light on the need to recognise the legacies of colonialism, together with the onslaught of capitalism and neoliberalism, which have created very different realities for the rich and the poor. Like COVID-19, the effects of climate change are hardest on the poorest and most vulnerable people.
They argue that a cultural shift is needed to prevent pandemics and to act on climate change in a meaningful way — one that requires transforming the material contexts of our lives and renegotiating power dynamics.
Video: A Desirable Future | A Horizon for 2030
This video is for those who, in 2020, doubted that it was still possible to do something. It speaks of the decade retrospectively with the narrator assuming we are already in the year 2030, and are proud of what we have accomplished.
- Production chains have been simplified; advertising as we know it has gone away; consumption has become essential-desire based.
- Some key species have become extinct; discontinuing pesticide saved pollinators; rewilding of natural habitats.
- Shared housing has become a norm; we took back control of key institutions like hospitals and schools; we took back power; money changed.
Further reading
If you’d like to check out more articles from last month, here are some more we enjoyed reading in June. They range from climate change, behaviour change to building a regenerative economy.
- Who is really to blame for climate change? The question of who is responsible for the climate crisis is a necessary one. It will inevitably impact the solutions we propose to fix things.
- Real, good, useful hope has nothing to do with positive news. Instead, it is profoundly linked with action: both ours and that of others alongside us… There’s only one way to earn hope, and that’s rolling up our sleeves. Is it wrong to be hopeful about climate change?
- This piece asks how can the unthinkable become policy? Building on recent work on the care economy, it explores the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic and opportunities for addressing the burden of unpaid care work on families.
- From Manchester University, this article, argues that a Green New Deal after COVID-19 must not fail to address traditional ideas about what kind of work matters, with a focus on gender inequality.
- The Regenerative Economic Shaper: A Framework for Architecting the Next Economy By Carol Sanford and Ben. Published in 5 parts on Medium — The Regenerative Economy Collaborative — Medium
- A delightfully illustrated piece on a therapy session between humanity, capitalism, & post-capitalism .
- Data in the UK shows that maintaining remote working after lockdown could cut two airports’ worth of emissions and eliminate 11.3 billion miles of commutes, a British clean air campaign has found.
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