By Vandana Shiva — 2016
In the wake of the Paris summit, Vandana Shiva suggests a manifesto for sustainability.
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CLEAR ALL
Taking care of nature means taking care of people, and taking care of people means taking care of nature.
Thinking more explicitly about cultural catalysis can help to accomplish in years what otherwise would require decades or not take place at all. As we experiment with cultural catalysis, we need to make it fast and benign rather than fast and pathological for the common good.
Knowing how environmental issues affect different groups of marginalized people in unique and often overlapping ways can help us build a more sustainable and equitable world.
From songs referencing grandma’s backyard garden to lyrics ripping government for destroying the water supply, many hip hop artists seamlessly weave climate justice into their sounds. After all, being sustainably savvy is how their grandparents and great-grandparents survived.
Facing oncoming climate disaster, some argue for “Deep Adaptation”—that we must prepare for inevitable collapse. However, this orientation is dangerously flawed. It threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy by diluting the efforts toward positive change.
The world is experiencing the dawn of a revolutionary transformation to becoming an ecologically literate and socially just civilization.
We need to value nature’s biodiversity, clean water, and seeds. For this, nature is the best teacher.
If you’re really paying attention, it’s hard to escape a sense of outrage, fear, despair. Author, deep-ecologist, and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy says: Don’t even try.
Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer.
Pope Francis has declared a global “climate emergency,” warning of the dangers of global heating and that a failure to act urgently to reduce greenhouse gases would be “a brutal act of injustice toward the poor and future generations.”