#also i heard meteor impact full voiced is coming soon

[shuuhui]

hello from the neighbour above

[the-moon-files]

The Chain being Down Bad🐕‍🦺™️ for Your Voice lol (Masc!Reader)

(Content under ✄----- )

@peepthatbish once again, our lovely muse peep (name twins!!) Has come to bless me, and hopefully i did that gorgeous idea justice, and dw im not done writing them all out yet :)

<333

Sun: Masculine Reader (he/him)

Orbit: Headcanons-ish

Stars: a dash of everybody <3

(except rare ones like Fierce/Koridai/Courage/Sage/etc.)

☆

Comets & Meteors: Content Warnings: fluff & Trigger Warnings: none known.

Please comment if i missed any. /gen

Ok but like

Ur voice is absolutely iconic to them

(Like the fairy fountain theme or the appearance of the Master sword, its unimaginable to them for your to not sound like that)

And its not only the heroes of Hyrule, but anyone else who could hear you

Well it helps that it used to be ur only sort of external sign of presence to outsiders

(the Links could also somewhat "feel" you in their own chests sometimes, like when u were stressed over a boss, or sad over a cutscene)

The only others who usually hear you are mostly things like the Great Fairies, the Deku Tree, other weird ass beings that know way too much (Fierce Deity)

So needless to say, when u first crash landed thru a portal into Wild's Hyrule (ur latest Zelda game you've played u guess thats why)

And the Chain had seen u in the distance, met up with you to try and help what they thought was some poor guy who accidentally fell thru Hylia's portals

But as they heard u stutter thru an introduction, instead they knew immediately it was you

Sky and Twi seriously teared up, Hyrule/Wild/Four/Wind all attacked you with a hug and excited shrieking, Legend and Wars were just gaping in shock, and Time was just staring at you

It took you a minute to pinpoint who was from what game, but as soon as you figured it out u literally jaw dropped at Time/Wild/Twi/etc.

(The ones that look different from their in game model or way better irl than graphics could ever capture)

U also may have screamed. A very manly scream. Not high pitched at all. You didnt make Legend cover his ears or the four that tackled u scramble off in fear, what- haha

(U cant blame urself, u were in literal shock, bc that's ALL the LINKS??!! Like u needed a shock blanket like rescue/ambulances gives ppl)

After calming down, it wasnt even an outright discussion or decision u could rlly choose,

They were basically kidnapping u along for the ride, also u were there for them (in pretty voice alone but still) for all their adventures,

So u even suggesting leaving u behind bc u couldnt keep up as well as them had them looking at you like they never even considered it

(And also making them individually go thru the 5 stages of grief: 😨😟😡😭🥺🙏🙏 they were all outright begging u, in their own ways, deadass by the end of it)

So as u travel, you get to understand the full impact of Your Voice, or the Guide's Voice™️.

If anyone has a nightmare, what would normally take another hero poking them with a stick and dodging the reflex punch, or them waking up unable to go back to sleep after having the nightmare, etc.

U quickly realized only took you talking to comfort them, with no reflex punch when they woke up, if they woke up, sometimes u were so good at it the nightmare just cleared ended according to their face

In your first battle against the shadow, along with lots of black-blooded monsters, u realized how much more confidently every Link fought as soon as you were speaking from behind them

They got even better and less stressed abt fighting when u managed to crack a few jokes or go toe to toe verbally with the Shadow lol

Legend outright guffawed when you pulled a dumb "sigh... well i guess... maybe... ur mom." joke in response to his villain monologue, like wiping a tear and everything, saying "u used to say that all the time after dumb long evil speeches, its a fucking classic" 💀

Literally will have them asking you to make more jokes bc it makes them feel better in tense situations/battles (most to least frequently: Sky, Wild, Hyrule, Wind, Twi, Time, Wars, Legend, Four) but they love it equally

Okay but,

U have Definitely. Sent chills down their spines when u get into lower ranges lol

U dont understand why everyone needs to talk to you so bad first thing in the morning,

or alternatively why they keep wanting you to go on a rant abt ur fav book/tv show/thing either???

U are always the last for story time at the campfire every night, and unlike the others, they refuse to let you take a night off, u have to say smth every night??

It amazes u they like ur voice so much, huh, Wild/Twi/Wars/Four/Hyrule must all be getting a little too close to the fire, theyre faces are looking a little red/pink

(Legend and Time just look rlly pleased/happy to be here, they only ever look a little overheated when u specifically look at them while ur talking/or tell a story abt them, and they usually are always the ones asking u another question to prompt u to keep going forever)

Wars may or may not have a life changing moment he told u abt ur voice on his adventures where Cia was like, "Ah Link... let me get a good look at you..."

Link: 😰🤢🥲

You: "... and girl, I am only looking at your tiddies right now."

If Wars had smth to drink right then he wouldve spit-taked.

It was like the one time he was caught so genuinely off-guard, and u just made him suddenly feel 10x more comfortable facing her, he literally couldnt keep his knight trained composure together, he had to lean on his knees he was crying with laughter

That was the first Cia heard of you too and she literally audibly gasped lmao

It was like all of a sudden Wars and Cia had been in on a joke no one else could hear around them (Shiek/Zelda is confused to this day by that)

And there are countless moments like this from each of their adventures where u did this, u cant help but feel mildly embarassed when u hear it at first

But then seeing how much ur voice and comments meant to them and how happy it made them u can help but want to talk more and more and more

Youve never felt more comfortable talking to this many people in ur entire life,

Bc u can literally see their elf ears twitching cutely when they pick up ur voice

BEST BELIEEEVVEEEE

u arent getting out of singing to them.

Yeah, sorry, theyve heard u sing ur fav songs while gaming too many times, they need to hear u sing irl, Now.

Most of them ignore or sort of passively enjoy bards/musicians on their journeys, but as soon as u so much as hum-

Its like they're all clambering to get closer to hear u, but also not make u aware thats what theyre doing, so they end up just:

Four/Legend/Hyrule trying to hide behind various (upside down) books, behind plants that're not that bushy, or one memorable time, when u sang "Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy" quietly to urself, a bard's tune got close and reminded u of it,

and Four fully threw his hammer on his toes bc he was so shocked/lovestruck, he completely missed the anvil and just threw it at the ground/his feet LMAO

Time and Wars, cheeky strategists they are, immediately fall back behind u wherever u are, so u cant see them, but they can still hear u lol

(Theyre the only ones youve not caught actively listening/straining to come closer to hear u... bc theyre behind u lol)

Wild/Sky/Twi all fully whip their heads around fast enough to crack it, then clumsily try to recover so u wont stop

Wild/Sky just fully accidentally like fall into lakes/ponds trying to stay just out of range or even (they both tried it once, and never again after u got onto them) got on a rooftop

And fell. When u got quieter they tried to get closer and- yep.

(Idiots were fine and smiling when u came to check on them)

Twilight.

Twilight's the worst ngl.

Just fully stares in awe at you until u stop out of embarassment, and has had the audacity multiple times to pop up as Wolfie and just happily listen like you havent also been thru the adventure that literally made him a werewolf

Wind is a cutie, he always joins in, esp when he recognizes the song, and since they can somehow remember the songs u sang while gaming, it will never not be a core memory for you to sing "Drunken Sailor" back to back with "I LOVE YOU HOE" by ODETARI (ft.9lives)

with Wind Waker Link.

You nearly died when you heard him singing the chorus, like literally right after drunken sailor 💀

(Its catchy u got it stuck in ur head from tiktok audios)

(Wind absolutely makes fun of the others for being in love with ur voice, like he'll trick u into ranting abt smth late at night when ur voice is husky or ur just low energy atm, and then from behind you just mouth at the rest of them, sitting looking up at you like ur an angel,

G A Y Y Y Y ����🫵🫵 )

☆

Sorry to anyone whose sent in stuff to my mailbox! I promise ill answer u tomorrow!!

Im acc running another blog for a diff fandom and i got busy today :/

BUT THANK U SM AND I LOVE YOU TO ANYONE WHO SENT STUFF IN !! <3333

Like, i would write a fic for u tysm for showing me ur interest bc it feels like tumbleweeds are blowing thru LU fandom when i check the tags 💀

Which isnt awful! I just like hearing feedback from ppl or just talking abt LU and stuff :)

Peace out,

🌙

[just-jammin]

Relighting

Word Count: 2024

Summary: The obscure yet infamous game of Sburb has probably caused some trauma & all-around bad times within the Chaos Family.

Their resident Protector can tell you all about it, and about how this predicament can be solved...

So. It’s been a while.

Not in the sense that I haven’t spoken to anyone in a while, just that I haven’t written a journal since... yeah, it wasn’t that long since I did that, but my point still stands.

Look, this whole Sburb thing is crazy ever since I first knew about it, but this is just outright ludicrous. The world-ending meteor shower, trying to process the abstract concepts & lore within the game, witnessing death itself... it’s not my cup of tea when it comes to first-hand experiences.

All of this reminds me of... something. It reminds me of a story that I’ve heard once while participating Mass, in a Homily. I can’t help it but think that it’s so much similar to our situation as of now.

How? I’ll tell it here.

>> —^— <<

In a dark, quiet room, there were four Candles.

Peace, Faith, Love, & Hope.

These four elements are very important to the story, as it is related to the people’s thoughts & actions. The Peace within the group, the Faith of triumph & joy, the unconditional Love for each other, and the Hope fueling our will to go on & go forth.

It’s all present in this session, as the Chaos Family. Even though we never formally met each other until the game started, and somehow one of us was accidentally sucked into it, we still have some camaraderie with each other.

And that’s when things started falling apart.

>> —^— <<

While talking to each other, the Candles noticed that Peace was melting.

You see, we never had proper Peace. We’re all about Chaos, right? But this is our kind of Peace; knowing that everyone is having fun & laughing along to our antics is our kind of Peace. It means that every single member is getting to know each other more.

Yet somehow, when we entered the Medium, things got serious. When I thought setting up a Zoom call tutorial thing for the extremely confused members was a mess, I didn’t expect our problems to be worse when we got our own Planets.

Don’t get me wrong, all of our Sprites did say that our Planets’ purpose was to strengthen ourselves. But all I could feel was insecurity. Scared of moving forward. And I bet the others felt that too.

Basically, our first impressions of our planets are outright Hell.

I think this is why fights started breaking out whenever we talked to each other. Whether it was a memo in Pesterchum (which we had to download), or just meeting up in one of the Planets, arguments are thrown here & there. Unfortunately, it escalated to rowdy fistfights that we had to have a hard time to let them struggle & break it up.

To be fair, sometimes I was in those fights. It was... rough.

Needless to say, this was a different kind of Chaos. It wasn’t the one we’re used to, nor the one that brings people together. It was the kind of Chaos that tears relationships apart and basically destroys everyone, inside & out.

When Peace had been standing in its final moments, it cried out, “Oh, what’s the use of me being here?! Everybody has been making a fool of themselves by causing nonsensical conflict!

“That’s it! I’m done here!”

There’s no Peace in there. Not anymore.

Its light flickers out.

>> —^— <<

There were three left.

And it had been for days.

Until one time, while the Candles were talking, they noticed that Faith was melting.

Faith. It’s hard to say when it was there in the first place.

I mean, to be fair, a lot of things are difficult to see in this Family, or the rest of Tumblr, actually. (Heh... I miss Tumblr...) But Faith comes in small things, like the friendships of others. And even full-on relationships. Little things like that can let us keep on believing that we can do better for ourselves.

That was... unfortunate.

Although entering the Medium was a win for all of us, there were also some losses for a handful of us.

It included our friends outside the Chaos Family. And even some of them in the Family.

Almost everyone not participating in our session is dead.

Dead. Gone forever.

It was a hard one to take in. Some of our real-life family relatives in our houses are still alive, but our Tumblr friends impacted some of us the most. People were crying. Like real tears.

And for some reason, I didn’t.

Almost all of my friends are here, my brother is here, and honestly, I didn’t have much back on Earth. Sure, my parents and relatives are gone, so that’s... depressing. But I can cope with them here. They’re the reason why I’m thriving.

The others? Not so much.

Faith had shouted while getting weakened, “Look, my own Faith is dwindling too, y’know?! They’re moping around in their own disbelief!

“I’m out!”

I guess I’m the only one who had more of it. But only by a smidge.

Its smoke wafts away in the dark.

>> —^— <<

And then there were two.

Unfortunately, Love was next to melt.

Ah, Love. This one is somewhat different from the story I’m telling than the source material.

You see, our Family’s Love never dwindled. We all still care for each other, no matter what happens to any of us. Through thick & thin, we helped each other to get ourselves up & going.

Heck, some of them got together romantically. Not that I’m too envious of them, but to be honest, they’re really cute with each other. A handful of them loved those outside of the Family, but you know what happened...

It’s just that we talked to each other less over time, either because of the missions we were given or because we just didn’t feel like talking to each other. It’s ok, I do respect their reasons, whether good or bad.

However, it just made me more concerned. I bet the others feel the same about that, but I think it’s been taking over my brain recently. I even tried talking about it to the closest people I know in the Family. No responses were made.

It doesn’t help that I have to literally build my way up, going through a complicated labyrinth of temperature-changing caverns filled with walking & talking thorny devils that hate me so much they shoot blood from their eyes at me.

Not to mention that I only have my annoying older brother with me, who only set my issue aside when I tried telling him. It sucks.

So no, our Love never dwindled.

It just became more isolated.

And yet, Love sobbed out, “Come on! Why am I not strong enough for them?! I thought I can keep all of them together!

“I can’t take this anymore!”

It just... feels like before. Numb all over.

Hehe, shit. I’m too familiar with that...

Love’s warmth faded away soon.

>> —^— <<

Only one was left standing.

The Candle of Hope.

Hope...

Well, that’s the only one that’s actually relevant to our session, huh?

It’s one of the main Aspects of Sburb, so of course it’s relevant! According to my Sprite, Hope is the embodiment of all positive emotions & beliefs, including Hope itself. It’s a pretty nice Aspect, in my opinion.

Anyway, Hope’s the one that got us through all our shit. Yes, even the very bad times. It’s basically a lifesaver for the Chaos Family and the rest of Tumblr. It can be distributed in many ways, from simple things like compliments, to posts like those ‘One Note a Day’ ones and a bunch of others like that.

But this, this is what I thought we were lacking the most at the time.

By that time, a little girl came running inside the dark room.

She noticed the other three Candles, melted & burnt out.

“Peace? Faith? Love?” she tried to call out.

I... didn’t think it was there when we started the session, nor when the fights started to break out. Not even when... when my friends started struggling with themselves.

Heck, some of them wanted to let their lives go to get to God Tier... or for worse intentions...

Shit, everything sucked.

The girl started tearing up, calling the other Candles repeatedly.

“Why?!” she finally sobbed. “Why aren’t you still burning?! You’re supposed to stay till the end, right?!”

At least, that’s what I thought... before, uh, that happened.

You see, it was one day while I was struggling to find my way through the Land of Rumors and Elements when someone stood in a distance away from me. When I tried to process who it was, they somehow got to me in quick speeds & punched my glasses off of me.

I was at a disadvantage by then. I tried to use my two knives (alchemized ones; they looked cool & they were more fit for fighting) to get them, but my eyesight is pretty crap. I missed my slashes so many times.

Then I felt them getting one of the knives, and it turned into what was basically a very inconvenient sword-fight. It went on for a long time, trying to injure free spots before getting parried repeatedly.

I then noticed a sharp pain on my right side.

When I turned my head towards the feeling, my right arm was on the ground.

Bleeding. Aching. Hurting.

Fading.

I faced the person one last time, and I only see a silhouette. On their head is a mint-colored circle with three wisp-like appendages... a symbol...

The next thing I knew, I was lying on stone. I was... weak. And tired.

On my side was my Sprite, a golden retriever with water buffalo horns & a fedora. She had a mournful look on her face.

I closed my own eyes & took a deep breath when I realized.

I was dying.

“RIGHT?!?!”

She cried out before falling to the ground, practically drowning in her own tears.

Then I felt as numb as I could ever be.

>> —^— <<

Then she heard a voice.

It said, “Worry not, child. I’m still here.”

She looked up to see the remaining Candle in the room.

“Why should I not worry, then?” the girl questioned.

It replied, “I can relight the others if you truly acknowledge my presence.”

She perked up at the response she was given. Crawling closer towards the Candle, she followed up with, “And why is that?”

A soft chuckle came out from it.

“Well... isn’t my name Hope?”

>> —^— <<

I didn’t expect to feel a burst of cool air from where my arm was cut off. At least, I didn’t expect it to be the first thing I felt since I died.

Then I felt something on my back, pushing me up & up until I recognized it as floating in the air. Little by little, my senses came back to normal. The numbness had subsided, replaced with what I think was... power.

My lungs breathed air again; I can make sounds; I can see, smell, hear, feel...

I’m human again. Alive. Awake.

Unfortunately, living again came with having to deal with pain. Remnants of the aching on my right arm arrived, so naturally, I let my left hand clench where it hurt. There was a scar on where I was touching, but I can unusually feel the rest of my arm...

Yep, I got my arm back. Nice, I guess. Let’s set that aside for now.

One other detail I noticed was that I was wearing a mostly yellow outfit: a sleeveless shirt, some leggings, and dark green boots, along with long fingerless gloves. I then took a look at a puddle to see that my reflection has a superhero-like mask on my face.

I did not know how the fuck they got on me.

Yet one thing’s for sure: I’ve ascended and went to God Tier.

And my role?

I relight our Family’s bond & trust with the help of Hope.

With shining eyes, the girl picked the Candle up and lighted the other three.

Peace, Faith, & Love.

All together, alight again, in the dark room.

>> —^— <<

I am the Rogue of Hope, the one who distributes Hope to others.

[artelingua]

'We have a once-in-century chance': Naomi Klein on how we can fight the climate crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/14/crisis-talk-green-new-deal-naomi-klein

On a Friday in mid-March, they streamed out of schools in little rivulets, burbling with excitement and defiance at an act of truancy. The little streams emptied on to grand avenues and boulevards, where they combined with other flows of chanting children and teens. Soon the rivulets were rushing rivers: 100,000 bodies in Milan, 40,000 in Paris, 150,000 in Montreal. Cardboard signs bobbed above the surf of humanity: THERE IS NO PLANET B! DON’T BURN OUR FUTURE. THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!

There was no student strike in Mozambique; on 15 March the whole country was bracing for the impact of Cyclone Idai, one of the worst storms in Africa’s history, which drove people to take refuge at the tops of trees as the waters rose and would eventually kill more than 1,000 people. And then, just six weeks later, while it was still clearing the rubble, Mozambique would be hit by Cyclone Kenneth, yet another record-breaking storm.

Wherever in the world they live, this generation has something in common: they are the first for whom climate disruption on a planetary scale is not a future threat, but a lived reality. Oceans are warming 40% faster than the United Nations predicted five years ago. And a sweeping study on the state of the Arctic, published in April 2019 in Environmental Research Letters and led by the renowned glaciologist Jason Box, found that ice in various forms is melting so rapidly that the “Arctic biophysical system is now clearly trending away from its 20th-century state and into an unprecedented state, with implications not only within but also beyond the Arctic.” In May 2019, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services published a report about the startling loss of wildlife around the world, warning that a million species of animals and plants are at risk of extinction. “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” said the chair, Robert Watson. “We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. We have lost time. We must act now.”

It has been more than three decades since governments and scientists started officially meeting to discuss the need to lower greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the dangers of climate breakdown. In the intervening years, we have heard countless appeals for action that involve “the children,” “the grandchildren,” and “generations to come”. Yet global CO2 emissions have risen by more than 40%, and they continue to rise. The planet has warmed by about 1C since we began burning coal on an industrial scale and average temperatures are on track to rise by as much as four times that amount before the century is up; the last time there was this much CO2 in the atmosphere, humans didn’t exist.

As for those children and grandchildren and generations to come who were invoked so promiscuously? They are no longer mere rhetorical devices. They are now speaking (and screaming, and striking) for them selves. Unlike so many adults in positions of authority, they have not yet been trained to mask the unfathomable stakes of our moment in the language of bureaucracy and overcomplexity. They understand that they are fighting for the fundamental right to live full lives – lives in which they are not, as 13-year-old Alexandria Villaseñor puts it, “running from disasters”.

On that day in March 2019, organisers estimate there were nearly 2,100 youth climate strikes in 125 countries, with 1.6 million young people participating. That’s quite an achievement for a movement that began eight months earlier with a single teenager deciding to go on strike from school in Stockholm, Sweden: Greta Thunberg.

The wave of youth mobilisation that burst on to the scene in March 2019 is not just the result of one girl and her unique way of seeing the world, extraordinary though she is. Thunberg is quick to note that she was inspired by another group of teenagers who rose up against a different kind of failure to protect their futures: the students in Parkland, Florida, who led a national wave of class walkouts demanding tough controls on gun ownership after 17 people were murdered at their school in February 2018.

Nor is Thunberg the first person with tremendous moral clarity to yell “Fire!” in the face of the climate crisis. Such voices have emerged multiple times over the past several decades; indeed, it is something of a ritual at the annual UN summits on climate change. But perhaps because these earlier voices belonged to people from the Philippines, the Marshall Islands and South Sudan, those clarion calls were one-day stories, if that. Thunberg is also quick to point out that the climate strikes themselves were the work of thousands of diverse student leaders, their teachers and supporting organisations, many of whom had been raising the climate alarm for years.

As a manifesto put out by British climate strikers put it: “Greta Thunberg may have been the spark, but we’re the wildfire.”

For a decade and half, ever since reporting from New Orleans with water up to my waist after Hurricane Katrina, I have been trying to figure out what is interfering with humanity’s basic survival instinct – why so many of us aren’t acting as if our house is on fire when it so clearly is. I have written books, made films, delivered countless talks and co-founded an organisation (The Leap) devoted, in one way or another, to exploring this question and trying to help align our collective response to the scale of the climate crisis.

It was clear to me from the start that the dominant theories about how we had landed on this knife edge were entirely insufficient. We were failing to act, it was said, because politicians were trapped in short-term electoral cycles, or because climate change seemed too far off, or because stopping it was too expensive, or because the clean technologies weren’t there yet. There was some truth in all the explanations, but they were also becoming markedly less true over time. The crisis wasn’t far off; it was banging down our doors. The price of solar panels has plummeted and now rivals that of fossil fuels. Clean tech and renewables create far more jobs than coal, oil, and gas. As for the supposedly prohibitive costs, trillions have been marshalled for endless wars, bank bailouts and subsidies for fossil fuels, in the same years that coffers have been virtually empty for climate transition. There had to be more to it.

Which is why, over the years, I have set out to probe a different set of barriers – some economic, some ideological, but others related to the deep stories about the right of certain people to dominate land and the people living closest to it, stories that underpin contemporary western culture. And I have investigated the kinds of responses that might succeed in toppling those narratives, ideologies and economic interests, responses that weave seemingly disparate crises (economic, social, ecological and democratic) into a common story of civilisational transformation. Today, this sort of bold vision increasingly goes under the banner of a Green New Deal.

Because, as deep as our crisis runs, something equally deep is also shifting, and with a speed that startles me. Social movements rising up to declare, from below, a people’s emergency. In addition to the wildfire of student strikes, we have seen the rise of Extinction Rebellion, which kicked off a wave of non-violent direct action and civil disobedience, including a mass shutdown of large parts of central London. Within days of its most dramatic actions in April 2019, Wales and Scotland both declared a state of “climate emergency,” and the British parliament, under pressure from opposition parties, quickly followed suit.

Humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts

In the US, we have seen the meteoric rise of the Sunrise Movement, which burst on to the political stage when it occupied the office of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in Washington, DC, one week after her party had won back the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections. They called on Congress to immediately adopt a rapid decarbonisation framework, one as ambitious in speed and scope as Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, the sweeping package of policies designed to battle the poverty of the Great Depression and the ecological collapse of the Dust Bowl.

The idea behind the Green New Deal is a simple one: in the process of transforming the infrastructure of our societies at the speed and scale that scientists have called for, humanity has a once-in-a-century chance to fix an economic model that is failing the majority of people on multiple fronts. Because the factors that are destroying our planet are also destroying people’s lives in many other ways, from wage stagnation to gaping inequalities to crumbling services to surging white supremacy to the collapse of our information ecology. Challenging underlying forces is an opportunity to solve several interlocking crises at once.

In tackling the climate crisis, we can create hundreds of millions of goods jobs around the world, invest in the most systematically excluded communities and nations, guarantee healthcare and childcare, and much more. The result of these transformations would be economies built both to protect and to regenerate the planet’s life support systems and to respect and sustain the people who depend on them.

This vision is not new; its origins can be traced to social movements in ecologically ravaged parts of Ecuador and Nigeria, as well as to highly polluted communities of colour in the United States. What is new is that there is now a bloc of politicians in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, some just a decade older than the young climate activists in the streets, ready to translate the urgency of the climate crisis into policy, and to connect the dots among the multiple crises of our times. Most prominent among this new political breed is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at 29, became the youngest woman ever elected to the US Congress. Introducing a Green New Deal was part of the platform she ran on. Today, with the race to lead the Democratic party in full swing, a majority of leading presidential hopefuls claim to support it, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. It had been endorsed, meanwhile, by 105 members of the House and Senate.

The idea is spreading around the world, with the political coalition European Spring launching a green new deal for Europe in January 2019 and a broad green new deal coalition of organisations in Canada coming together (the leader of the New Democratic party has adopted the frame, if not its full ambition, as one of his policy planks). The same is true in the UK, where the Labour party is in the middle of negotiations over whether to adopt a green new deal‑style platform.

Those of us who advocate for this kind of transformative platform are sometimes accused of using it to advance a socialist or anticapitalist agenda that predates our focus on the climate crisis. My response is a simple one. For my entire adult life, I have been involved in movements confronting the myriad ways that our current economic systems grinds up people’s lives and landscapes in the ruthless pursuit of profit. No Logo, published 20 years ago, documented the human and ecological costs of corporate globalisation, from the sweatshops of Indonesia to the oil fields of the Niger Delta. I have seen teenage girls treated like machines to make our machines, and mountains and forests turned to trash heaps to get at the oil, coal and metals beneath.

The painful, even lethal, impacts of these practices were impossible to deny; it was simply argued that they were the necessary costs of a system that was creating so much wealth that the benefits would eventually trickle down to improve the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. What has happened instead is that the indifference to life that was expressed in the exploitation of individual workers on factory floors and in the decimation of individual mountains and rivers has instead trickled up to swallow our entire planet, turning fertile lands into salt flats, beautiful islands into rubble, and draining once vibrant reefs of their life and colour.

I freely admit that I do not see the climate crisis as separable from the more localised market-generated crises that I have documented over the years; what is different is the scale and scope of the tragedy, with humanity’s one and only home now hanging in the balance. I have always had a tremendous sense of urgency about the need to shift to a dramatically more humane economic model. But there is a different quality to that urgency now because it just so happens that we are all alive at the last possible moment when changing course can mean saving lives on a truly unimaginable scale.