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Finding a place to take a stand
Finding a place to take a stand
Mapping regions bio and cultural
The Raven is increasingly focusing on the concept of regionalism, the idea that, as urbanist Lewis Mumford put forward many years ago, there is a “regional framework of civilization.”
Mumford’s thinking, to which The Raven devoted a series beginning here, is that regions are the basic units through which the world is connected. He wrote, “Real interests, real functions, real intercourse flow across (national boundaries): while the effective organs of concentration are not national states . . . but the regional city and the region.”
This is more than an abstract discussion. In focusing on the regional dimension, I am pointing in a direction to cope with and eventually rebuild from a time of national and global breakdown. As the tagline of this web journal states, to plot a path for “living beyond empire.”
Breakdown is increasingly in the foreground. Conflicts and divisions are growing within nations and between them. Supply chains are snapping. Climate chaos is intensifying. National and global institutions are increasingly incapable of responding to the interwoven crises facing us. In fact, national and global elites continue to pursue models through which they have gained power and wealth, even as the destructive consequences of those models escalate. Whether it is continuing to expand the production of fossil fuels and arms, or perpetuating a profit-oriented capitalism heedless of social and ecological impacts.
Elites insulated in their bubbles will be the last ones to feel the consequences, which is why they will continue to prolong them. As historian Arnold Toynbee determined from his study of civilizations, this is the dynamic that causes civilizations to collapse.
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Beyond the clash of empires
Beyond the clash of empires
A world of living places
Empire’s law – The unbridled pursuit of power
I’ve seen this movie before.
A large and powerful nation attacks a small and weaker nation. Fiery explosions light up the night. Their thunder roars across the landscape while armored columns roll over the border. Shock and awe. Kyiv 2022. Bagdad 2003. It all looks much the same.
Empires press against each other. People are caught in the middle. In Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, to name a few of the recent battlegrounds. Roadkill in the imperial struggle for power. Leave aside the justifications and charges each side will throw against one another. The problem is as old as civilization itself. The problem is empire.
Empire has one law, one imperative. It is the unbridled pursuit of power and expansion, always ruled by an imperial class that concentrates power in its own hands. The nature of empire is to centralize as much power as possible until it sucks the life out of its vassals, its conquests, its lands, its slaves. Empires are parasites.
Empires knows no limits. Until they find them. In barbarian tribes. In other empires. In their own internal decay. They exhaust their own resources until they crumble under challenges they can no longer handle. It’s a story as old as the Akkadian empire, history’s first, beginning around 4,300 years ago, continuing through successor empires, Assyria, Babylon, Rome, and many others down to the present day.
That is what is happening in our time. Only the stakes are unprecedently high. Mesopotamian empires could fall and pass on a legacy of deserts, their formerly fertile soils salted by irrigation works. Rome could collapse and leave a time of breakdown and urban collapse in its wake. But yesterday’s empires were of limited scope…
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Why I am not a climate doomist
Why I am not a climate doomist
People power is changing the story
Some of my best friends are climate doomists, and I know why. A set of negative and potent trends feed doomism. Temperatures keep hitting new records, as do carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. We’re back to carbon levels not seen for three to five million years. Fossil fuel use keeps increasing. And feedback loops are already churning. From the Amazon, where rainforests have turned from one of the planet’s great carbon storage reservoirs to a net emitter, to the poles, where ice is disappearing at rapid rates. There are lots of reasons to believe we’ve already crossed the line, and coming generations will be wracked by uncontained climate chaos.
Despite all that, I am not a doomist, and believe we still have possibilities to leave our children and their generations with a world with which they can cope. After many years working on climate, that is how I express my climate mission. There is no doubt that humanity will be adapting to the consequences of our fossil-fueled bacchanal for generations, if not millennia. We will be learning to live with far less water in certain regions, and too much in others. We will be dealing with dustbowls where there were breadbaskets, and retreating from coastal cities. Storms will be ravaging, and wildfires widespread. But we will be coping, and will have eliminated the root causes of climate chaos, fossil fuel pollution and deforestation.
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