White Supremacism and the Earth System

In the vein of other material reflecting on the #intersectionality between #climatechange #racism #decolonisation #blacklivesmatter #usa #trump #covid-19 #collapse & other themes thereabouts. An excellent read.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/white-supremacism-and-the-earth-system-fa14e0ea6147

by Nafeez Ahmed:

The decisions we make right now will plant the seeds for the task of rebuilding, redesigning, and recreating the next life cycle for our species.

This has quite profound implications.

It means that many structures we see around us at this moment are destined to disappear, one way or another. Many of them are already experiencing interlocking, cascading failures. We need to accept the demise of those systems which, through their own brittleness, stubbornness, and narcissism, are incapable of change. There will be terrible fallout from this process and we need to do all we can to mitigate the impacts.

Simultaneously, we need to also cast our gaze ahead, toward what we need to create, toward the new life-patterns we are being called to bring into being, the new relationships, the new values.

We will need to bring forth all our creativity and wisdom; we will need to do our best to stop thinking in silos, and to see the world in its complex intersectionality; we will need to integrate our struggles in unfamiliar ways, not just through public statements, but through new institution-changing actions; we will need to reflect really deeply on how changing and upgrading our perceptions translates into changing and upgrading who we are and how we are, across all our relationships; and we will need to roll up our sleeves and work together across multiple sectors and systems to scale up how we can leverage that process to create transformative conditions for the flourishing of life, by challenging ourselves as well as challenging prevailing unequal, destructive, narcissistic power structures, especially those within our reach.

The Black Lives Matter eruption is the outcome of a civilizational inflection point — a point-of-no-return — beyond which we face two choices: escalating collapse, or systemic transformation. The imperial system of structural racism and ecological plunder is crumbling beneath the weight of its own diminishing returns. Where does your allegiance belong? To that which is already doomed, or to an emerging life-world of possibility?