https://www.nationofchange.org/2023/10/10/any-antidote-to-climate-anxiety-involves-organizing/
Any antidote to climate anxiety involves organizing
By Paul Messersmith-Glavin -October 10, 2023
..."I put my hope in everyday #people’s ability to rise to the challenge of #remaking #society, rather than the benevolence or wisdom of the ruling class. An essential dimension of the ongoing #ecological #crisis we find ourselves in is the ongoing crisis in society which shapes and directs our relationship with the rest of nature. The relationship between human social and political structures and their impact on the rest of the natural world is one of the most important insights of social theorist Murray Bookchin. His formulation, that the crisis in the environment results from the crisis in society, helps guide our thinking about, and strategies for, ways out. For #Bookchin, in order to resolve the environmental crisis, we have to address its origins in the structures and class relations of society.
Doing the work, nurturing #community and #organizing, and being prepared to act is the best guarantee that we’ll have a life worth living.
The society that delivered the dystopia we daily inhabit will not guide us out of it; only a fundamental change in our relationships and social structures can do that. In this sense, the climate crisis offers us terminal incentive to remake society into one that no longer attempts to dominate non-human nature, that instead creates a society that can live in nature, rather than against it. We need to collectively find another way.
By changing our relations to each other, nurturing community and better developing self-sufficiency in food and energy production, in tandem with developing a mass movement to challenge established power, we develop a trajectory with a better chance of survival. Through self-organization, coordination and developing counter-institutions and dual-power, we increase our odds amidst future uncertainties and unexpected developments.
Those currently in power are creating a future that favors themselves through increased surveillance, authoritarianism and repression. We need to nurture and develop a counter-tendency: one based in love and sustaining healthy relations with each other and the rest of the natural world, while building the capacity to collectively and militantly confront those in power. In “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice,” Mariame Kaba points out “Changing everything might sound daunting, but it also means there are many places to start, infinite opportunities to collaborate, and endless imaginative interventions and experiments to create. … let’s ask, ‘What can we #imagine for ourselves and the world?’ If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us.”...
