Author Description

The world is on fire. It has been, for quite some time. If you've done any organizing, you've felt it--that sense of racing about, extinguishing this flare up or that, spending precious energy and resources surviving the immediate emergency and hoping the future will somehow save itself. If you've watched the news, you've felt it--disbelief combined with the raw hilarity of the media circus; just when it seems things couldn't get worse, or more frightening, or more absurd, they do. If you've ever worked three jobs to keep your family afloat, you've felt it. If you've listened to climate scientists, or survived a hurricane, or watched helplessly as an unseasonable forest fire tore through a landscape you loved, you've felt it--the rising certainty that we have waited too long, that global temperatures are edging toward tipping points from which we will never return. We are burning.... We don't yet know what strategies are going to work, or what life forms and social forms will survive the transition from past to future. We don't know what culture and society will look like--which ingredients it might revitalize from ancestral knowledge systems, and which innovations it might incorporate from emergent social contexts and experiences. There will be transformation. There will be evolution--and revolution. There will continue to be change.... The civilization that brought us to this point of peril will not be the one that gets us through and out the other side to a society that is ecologically sustainable, equitable, and free.