Modern life rests on many shadowlands that we find ways not to see–destroyed ecosystems, exploited labour, colonial genocides, land expropriations of the past and present, ghost acres, climate change and the ‘storms of our grandchildren,’ ecological holocausts like the Canadian tar sands, social holocausts like the destruction of indigenous people’s lifeways.

TJ invites us to not only respond to current incidences of violence, but to also prevent future violence from happening, thereby breaking (generational) cycles of violence. TJ works to respond to immediate needs in a way that moves us closer to what we ultimately long for. In other words, how can we respond to violence in ways that not only address the current incident of violence, but 

I'm reading through other's posts in this subforum and it's helping me sort things out. I'm beginning to see how wanting others to behave differently is selfish.

Theorizations of sustainability transformation have foregrounded the construction (making) of novel socioecological relations; however, they generally have obscured processes of deliberate deconstruction (unmaking) of existing, unsustainable ones.

want to believe that we are always capable of regenerative growth, that change is always possible, but I know that the trees most vulnerable to toppling during wildfires are the ones that have been burned many times before. We can repeat the process of regenerative growth only so many times before we must return to the earth and become something else. I used to think of time as a line, our lives short and finite. But now I look at the way fire makes a forest morph into something unrecognizable yet still remain the same forest. The way that the soil beneath us contains both the future and the past. Perhaps the more accurate truth is that this is all a circle. I look at my cousin, seven years old with the same love for the soft fibers of redwood leaves and the natural world that his father had. From the ashes of these wildfires, new redwoods and sprouts will grow, and my cousin will grow up running beneath them, through the chimney trees, and it will all go on.

For the redwood forest, fire is a sign of change and growth, naturally occurring and clearing out the underbrush, the ashes becoming nutrients in the soil. The forest is at last able to blossom and breathe. The redwood trees themselves stand tall amongst the flames, their thick fire-resistant bark a protective shield. Even when elderly trees do topple, they scatter tiny sprouts in their wake. Through a scorching, forest floors that once never saw light are suddenly soaked in it, nutrients are recycled. Insect pests, invasive species, and diseased trees are cleared away for new saplings. The process is called regenerative growth. A time for rebirth sets in. From the chaos comes an opportunity.

The human body regenerates itself like the redwood. We are constantly replacing our dead cells with new ones. Our resilience to damage is great, and every decade or so we are entirely recreated, not one cell in our bodies the same as ten years prior.

Let us gratefully acknowledge the wisdom of the traditions that came before us, and are re-emerging today, bearing strong witness to the interconnectedness of all life.  Let us also borrow the perspective of future generations and, in that larger context of time, look at how this Great Turning is gaining momentum, accelerated by the choices of countless individuals as they band together in networks and campaigns all over the world.  We can see this happening simultaneously in three areas or dimensions that are mutually reinforcing: actions to resist and slow down the damage to Earth and all its beings; analysis and transformation of the socio-economic foundations of our common life; and a perceptual, cognitive, and moral shift to biocentric values and world views that affirm our human responsibility to life in all its richness and diversity and to future generations. Many people are engaged in all three dimensions of this Great Turning, all of which are necessary for the creation of a life-sustaining and just society.

It involves the emergence of new and creative human responses, as well as a reawakening of sustainable indigenous traditions, that propel the transition from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life Sustaining Society. Attitudes shift from exploitation to respect, from extraction to regeneration, from competition to cooperation. More and more of us come to see how we are interwoven together as peoples, and that solidarity with one another is a way through these crises.  So we join together to act for the sake of life on Earth.

My sense is that we will have to create alternatives focussed at a very different scale and towards very different outcomes, building regenerative business ecologies at the bioregional and local scale through global cooperation. These might eventually make the degenerative globalised system — that is simply too big not to fail — obsolete.

The step from sustainability to regeneration is more than a change in simple terminology. It is a change in mindset and worldview that will drive profound transformation. Yet there is no need to dismiss anyone striving for sustainability on the journey towards a regenerative human impact on Earth.

we need to focus on transformative rather than incremental change now that there is a sudden surge in interest by many large corporations and international business in going beyond sustainability, being net-positive and aiming to be regenerative.

It is a specific set of social relations resulting from capitalist accumulation, which not only drive the reproduction of capitalism but act as a central stabilizing mechanism in modern society.

These social relations are simultaneously generative of rapid economic growth, and impoverishment and inequality

“Inherent in the dynamics of capitalism is a powerful drive to earn profits, invest them, innovate and thus grow the economy….These features of capitalism, as they are constituted today, work together to produce an economic and political reality that is highly destructive of the environment.” (7) Much of the book explores this drive of capitalism toward unlimited quantitative growth, the role of the market in this drive, the centrality of the corporation in carrying out accumulation, the wastefulness of consumption under capitalism, and the domination of the corporations over governments.

Speth apparently agrees with other writers such as Naomi Klein or Herman Daly. Daly, for example, has written a series of notable books and articles arguing for a “Steady State Economy.” He argues that the growth-driven industrial economy we live under is incompatible with an ecologically sustainable society. Daly advocates an economy which develops qualitatively, as he puts it, but not quantitatively (with appropriate and balanced development of the poorer nations). “The remaining natural world no longer is able to provide the sources and sinks for the metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized economy—much less a growing one….The economy must conform to the rules of a steady state—seek qualitative development, but stop aggregate quantitative growth.” (Daly 2008; 1) Better not bigger. He believes that such an economy would produce as much happiness among the people as our existing system—if not more. “…The correlation between absolute income and happiness extends only up to some threshold of ‘sufficiency’….” (10)

Yet he is dissatisfied. While the establishment environmentalists won certain improvements (in cleaner air and water, for example), overall the environment has gotten much worse. “We have been winning battles…but losing the war.” (xii) This recognition has moved him to his left.

There is an interesting development in the anti-climate change/ecological movement. Most environmentalist leaders and theorists have been liberals or moderates. They have seen capitalism and its state as the necessary framework for preventing ecological catastrophe. But after decades of failure, some of these environmentalists have come to accept the analysis of radical ecologists, that the cause of climate warming (and other ecological problems) is the capitalist system, its drive to accumulate and grow indefinitely, its market, its inequality, poverty, and exploitation, and its national states. Yet these same environmentalists reject the radicals’ conclusion that capitalism must be replaced by socialism—meaning some kind of cooperative, nonprofit, economy with democratic planning and production for use. (As I will discuss, there is a decentralized and radically democratic version of socialism which is advocated by anarchists.)

Chapter Seven: Two Forms of Prefigurative Politics

I was personally really impacted by the first two interviews that he did with Scott Mann. It was an absolute privilege to be involved in this interview and to learn about how his work has progressed, especially with regards to what he calls "creating pathways out of empire".

On the one hand it encloses through its territorial borders, while on the other, through the subordination of people’s imaginaries to patriotic identities

The basis of imperialism is the division of the world into an “anarchic” system of independent nation-states. There is no larger structure of decision-making that regulates human society on a global scale. Nation-states are thus only constrained in their conduct on the world stage by fear of what other states can do to them. Competition between nation-states puts pressure on each state to maximize its power to avoid subordination to others. States that have little power will be under severe pressure to align themselves with more muscular states that have major military and economic forces at their disposal. The logic of the nation-state system is similar to that of competition in the sphere of production. The world’s productive forces are divided into competing business organizations where each can survive only as long as its sales revenue is greater than its costs. Competition forces companies to constantly seek innovations that lower their per unit costs, especially labor costs. A company with greater resources will be much more likely to survive in the constantly changing world of market forces and attempts by competitors to take away their market share. A company must pursue economic expansion to survive in such a world. Competition between nation-states has the same logic, leading inevitably to the “arms race,” that is, technological innovation to enhance the destructive power that a state can bring to bear on the world scene. “Dominate or be dominated” is as much the logic of competition between nation-states as between businesses. The imperialist tendency is inherent in every state. The formation of new nation-states can no more put an end to imperialism than the formation of new businesses can put an end to capitalism. The “defeat” of one empire in this or that region, or the long-term decline of a formerly dominant power, will not bring an end to the system of imperialism but merely facilitate the rise of a new empire, or the rise of numerous mini-imperialist tendencies, with all the dangers of military conflict that implies.

The State, therefore, is the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest. —Mikhail Bakunin[1]

Stalin’s famous, ‘nations have a common language, territory, economic life and culture’

The project contributes to better understanding of the root causes of the ecological crisis, brings important insights into sustainability transitions at grassroots and points of friction with the growth economy, and enhances our knowledge on concrete solutions for alternative ways of organizing the economy.

3 See for instance the Goldfinger Factory, http://www.goldfingerfactory.com/ or Nea Guinea in Greece,www.neaguinea.org.4 The same core group of people in Greece established PRO.S.K.AL.O. (Cooperation Initiative for Social andSolidarity Economy), Bioscoop (a consumers’ food cooperative), Initiative 136 (a citizens’ initiative for themanagement of water resources, http://www.136.gr/article/citizens-bid-control-thessalonikis-water), as well as thePeople’s University of Social Solidarity Economy, http://www.univsse.gr/p/univsse-in-english.htmlPAGE 31