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Ultimately, we’re trying to center what good relations to the land means. Instead of talking about car batteries, I think the real conversation should be: why are we working more than twenty hours per week? Why are there jobs that require air travel? Why don’t we have a universal basic income across the globe so people don’t have to leave their hometowns to find work? How do we end border imperialism so capital doesn’t have an endless supply of cheap labor?

Nick Estes, https://logicmag.io/nature/water-is-life-nick-estes-on-indigenous-technologies/ 

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We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa's sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass p. 199.

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St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio (Carl Weidemeyer, 1911)

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Public Power

TIL Nebraska is the only state where all the electricity comes from a public grid.  Interesting case study to look at as Chicago seeks to #DemocratizeComEd.  Though a public grid doesn’t mean a clean grid - In 2019, Nebraska obtained 55% of its in-state electricity net generation from coal, with the portion of energy generated from coal expected to increase by 2030.  

https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2015/01/30/nebraskas-community-owned-energy/

https://www.democratizecomed.org/

https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=NE

https://www.cleancooperative.com/news/will-municipal-energy-agency-of-nebraska-remain-reliant-on-coal

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In city planning, participatory democracy has largely increased inequality, not lessened it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/upshot/pandemic-city-planning-inequality.html

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Admit racial inequity is a problem of bad policy, not bad people.

Identify racial inequity in all its intersections and manifestations.

Investigate and uncover the racist policies causing racial inequity.

Invent or find antiracist policy that can eliminate racial inequality.

Figure out who or what group has the power to institute antiracist policy

Disseminate and educate about the uncovered racist policy and anti- racist policy correctives

Work with sympathetic antiracist policymakers to institute the anti- racist policy

Deploy antiracist power to compel or drive from power the unsympathetic racist policymakers in order to institute the antiracist policy.

Monitor closely to ensure the antiracist policy reduces and eliminate racial inequality

When policies fail, do not blame the people. Start over and seek out new and more effective antiracist treatments until they work.

Monitor closely to prevent new racist policies from being instituted.

- Ibram X. Kendi

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What if we assessed the methods and leaders and organizations by their results of policy change and equity? What if strategies and policy solutions stemmed not from ideologies but from problems? What if antiracists were propelled only by the craving for power to shape policy in their equitable interests?

-Ibram X. Kendi

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First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.

Martin Luther King, Jr. 

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

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The concept of the “personal carbon footprint” was popularized by BP in a 2005 media campaign costing over $100 million — a campaign that, research has indicated, deflected responsibility for climate change away from the corporation and onto the individual consumer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-climate-change.html

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No one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities of life.

Paul VI, Populorum progressio, no. 23. 

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And yet, business as usual. 

Source: EPA. 2015. Climate Change in the United States: Benefits of Global Action. United States EnvironmentalProtection Agency, Office of Atmospheric Programs, EPA 430-R-15-001.

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Suppose it’s the right time...

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This is why I don't like the story of the good samaritan. Everyone likes to think of themselves as the person who sees someone beaten and bloodied and helps him out. That’s too easy. If I could re-write that story, I'd rewrite it from the perspective of Black America. What if the person wasn't beaten and bloody? What if it wasn't so obvious? What if they were just systematically challenged in a thousand small ways that actually made it easier for you to succeed in life? Would you be so quick to help then? Or would you, like most White people, stay silent and let it happen?

John Metta 

https://thsppl.com/i-racist-538512462265#.97rno8isx

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Beauty is about more rounded substantial becoming. And I think when we cross a new threshold that if we cross worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere...So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.

John O’Donohue 

http://www.onbeing.org/program/inner-landscape-beauty/transcript/1125

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http://www.mohamadkhayata.com/#/bits/

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Winter

In my heart

It never stops

It never stops