Dear reader,
After a few months of being consumed by creating, and then running, the debut iteration of Green Dreamer’s 10-week imagination program, ~alchemize~ (plus now gearing up to launch its second cohort which you can learn more about here), I am back to re-establish my writing habit.
To be honest, without grant support for Green Dreamer this year (and never corporate sponsorships), we felt pressured with an urgency to create a sort of “signature program” of our own in an attempt to be able to replace the more significant grants we had during our years prior. Publishing over 400 “free” podcast episodes and asking for voluntary small-dollar Patreon memberships has not been substantial enough to fully sustain our work, so we had to get creative in thinking of alternative ways to continue operating. Overall, we are stoked about how the first cohort went, though admittedly, it did take me away from my monthly explorations here. But I have not forgotten about this newsletter!
Open loops, loose threads…
These have been extremely difficult and dystopic times that often make me feel at a complete loss for words. At the same time, there is so much spinning and spilling over my mind that I look forward to now having more mind and heart space again to sit down and let my ponderings flow.
I have also been working to develop a different relationship with this newsletter. For a long time, I had maintained that I only wanted to publish something once my ideas felt “fully formed” — whatever that meant.
Part of this comes from my imposter syndrome — not feeling like my voice is worthy of taking space. Part of this comes from my dissatisfaction with the attention economy and wanting to practice slow media. Part of this comes from me being an extremely conflict-averse person who doesn’t want to upset anyone with what I put out — which I realize is impossible when people have different and often opposing perceptions of reality itself based on our contextual spheres of influence.
I remind myself, though, that I chose to have an “independent” outlet for a reason — to be able to authentically and honestly share whatever it is I want to share or critique without having ulterior incentives dangled over my head or any threats of having the supporting rug pulled out from beneath me. There is a reason I have little hope for ever receiving grant support from the major “green” philanthropies — most of whom support forms of “greening” that just greenwashes extractivism and global injustice… things I am keen to challenge.
I also remind myself that achieving collective healing and liberation means going against the grain — of dominant narratives, institutions, ideologies, cultures, values, systems, and powers. It means unwiring the pre-programmed logic underpinning this matrix which is all that many of us even know. It means shattering the distorted lenses through which many people have been deeply influenced to see the world through.
So if it takes a toll, if it leads to discomfort and growing pains, if it brings punishment and pushback, if it increases depression, anxiety, and burnout, it is because it is rightfully exhausting and soul-sucking to have to constantly swim against powerful currents.
Finally, a significant part of my writer’s block has come from just how my mind functions — always wanting to connect the dots between seemingly disparate topics… this itch I get that to talk about one thing mandates that I then talk about another thing and then another, and then, well, everything…
How do I just talk about climate change without also talking about, say, language loss and how that reflects the erosion of place-based relationships and biocultural knowledges? How do I talk about biodiversity loss without also talking about colonial borders and water infrastructures that pixelate, sever, and disrupt the intra-dependent entanglement and cycles of life? How do I talk about the energy transition without also talking about how trade deals have made our entire global food networks so much more energy-intensive to feed the same number of calories, and why often the same countries are nonsensically exporting and then importing the same amounts of meat products and produce? How do I talk about ecocide without also talking about resource conflicts, corporate monopolization, and wars instigated by the world’s most “powerful” military forces?
I have never really felt like I belonged in the “environmental movement” because I don’t see issues of “ecology” being neatly about “nature” (which is also a colonial framing that by definition binaries and separates humans vs. all else other than humans and what humans create). And I have never really felt like I belonged in the “climate” movement because I do not resonate with reducing it to energy topics or equations of emissions and sequestration.
For me, the conceptual urges of reductionism are part of the meta- and poly-crisis itself. Rather than simplifying and siloing, I’m more interested in complicating and weaving.
Visible urgency, slow undercurrents…
Even as the genocidal violence in Sudan, Congo, Palestine, and beyond asks for urgent, immediate attention, my mind wanders: What might they have to do with Big Ag and our local food systems? Or climate change and habitat loss? Or peoples’ cultural values and cosmologies? Or urban development or transportation networks locking people into a particular energy-intensive reliance in order to simply live? Or corporate pressures of financialization away from cash-based economies?
These questions have led me to think a lot about power.
Why is it that a majority of citizens of the United States can support some policy change (e.g., universal healthcare coverage or ceasefire in Palestine), but that “public pressure” — including through electoral politics and even disruptive protests — has so far, at least, been more often than not unable to move the needle? What will it take? Where does leverage come from? How do we reclaim power?
I think about my friends who do not engage much with the news and who also live land-based, subsistence lifestyles — barely ever visiting big chain shops or grocery stores. The mainstream economy has little power over them because they do not rely on it to live. They, therefore, are less complicit in the violence of Empire. I think about someone like Rob Greenfield, who has had the privilege to learn how to disentangle himself from centralized systems and voluntarily earn less than a taxable income. The government and corporate world hold no power over people like him, as they have been able to nearly, if not completely, stop being enablers of these narcissistic nation-states who abuse people’s collective funds to fuel violence, ecological destruction, and extractivist policies.
As Rob shared with me a few years ago, the fact that he voluntarily lives under the “poverty threshold” doesn’t mean that he feels insecure because he, in fact, feels extremely secure through the ways he has designed his life to prioritize relationships and land-based knowledge. He also shared that not paying federal taxes doesn’t mean he isn’t “contributing to society.”
The concept of a community pooling together resources to bring to fruition things that can serve the collective good is beautiful.
But the reality is that most political establishments, tethered by economic globalization and multinational corporate interests, do not actually serve their peoples’ and the planet’s health. They actually often work against them.
So rather than enabling a government that does not care for reparative justice and continues to fund wars and amplify injustice at all levels, Rob shares that he contributes by giving back 100% of his media earnings directly to grassroots organizations with aligning values and intentions. He also contributes to community care through non-monetary ways, like helping to grow publicly accessible food forests that provide for particular neighborhoods, and so forth.
I share about Rob not to idealize his specific approach per se, but to pull through the underlying questions on what it really means to build security, safety, abundance, health, fulfillment, belonging, and collective wellbeing… all things that I believe our hearts are more deeply longing for… but yearnings that often get weaponized or co-opted by state-imposed ideologies of what those things entail in practice.
Rewiring power, nurturing relations…
What does localized community building have to do with the reclamation of power? I think everything. And this is what I see as the quieter but vital long-term, intergenerational and intercommunal work of rewiring present power dynamics and unwiring the current extractive networks of life.
It speaks to a both-and of recognizing that the immediacy of our varied crises requires chipping away persistently at the system, day in and day out.
While I believe in an all-of-the-above approach — watering the cumulative strength of people’s movements, organized protests, direct action, and working both inside and outside of institutions — I think the fine threads that tie the louder, viscerally urgent matters to the less sensationalize-able, slower and steadier work of rebuilding community-rooted networks need to be reinforced a lot more.
The more that relationships and actions of collective care become commodified and commercialized transactions, the more that resources get extracted from the “bottom” to the “top” — and then the more power that centralized establishments and systems can hold over their people. This trend has played itself out over and over again in formerly sovereign communities that have had their local markets of collective abundance forcibly pried open by colonial and extractive interests — thereby creating scarcity for people who had the means to richly sustain themselves.
I previously explored these themes across conversations with Helena Norberg-Hodge on “Reorienting towards economics of happiness,” where she talked about these events happening in the community of Ladahk; with farmer Jon Jandai on “realigning with true abundance”, where he talked about his personal story of redefining wealth and reclaiming power in community; with Konda Mason on “Holding love capital sacred”; with Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on “Re-indigenizing our views of poverty and true wealth”; and with Raj Patel and Dr. Rupa Marya on “Deep medicine for collective healing” — naming the non-dollarizable things people are doing to rebuild power.
I also explored with Dr. Vandana Shiva the corrosive impacts of financialization on community — forcing people off of cash economies to rely on big banks for every single monetary transaction, engineering extraction into the logic of the system itself.
As I shared in my conversation with Konda:
“To give an example, I'm thinking about how when my grandma mends clothes for me, or when my mom cooks for me, or when a friend delivers soups and medicines to me when I'm sick, those are invaluable forms of mutual love and relationship building that just can't be dollarized. They strengthen my community and are able to enrich me in ways that monetary value can't capture.
But when all of those become services that I pay for, the financial capital becomes a more reductive substitute for the other forms of capital, so they tend to become more transactional.
Many people today are forced to partake in our economies in this transactional way because maybe we've lost other forms of wealth and privilege, but it may be instructive in orienting us towards a more holistically enriching life and society.”
Relational currencies of collective care…
In recognizing how our tax contributions to a corrupt government makes us complicit in however they prioritize their spending, many have been strategizing about withholding tax payments as acts of protest (there are a variety of ways to engage as explored here). Such coordinated efforts at scale can indeed wield a lot of power. But some also worry about potential punitive repercussions that may follow anti-establishment gestures. After all, legality is arbitrated by state power and not rooted in morality.
When I sit with this idea of a “crisis in form” as named by Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, I think about how the shapes of activism by way of centralized marches in front of government buildings and business headquarters actually affirm state and corporate power. Noting the “medium is the message,” I see the language of these forms expressing, “you have all the power; so now listen to our demands.”
Why won’t they listen? But what incentives do they have to listen if we affirm their power? Where is the leverage? Are threats to vote differently going to change much when people are presented with a faux menu of “choice” mostly pre-curated by existing political establishment ladders anyway?
Once again, I reiterate that I align with “all-of-the-above” approaches in such all-hands-on-deck moments. Yes-and. Everything done to disrupt status quo ways of operating is additive and crucial. And still, it is pertinent to sit with this interrogation of power — to think through the proportionality of the diverse ingredients we use in this growing feast of composting and breaking down power-over.
I wonder, as supplements or perhaps as the main course:
What if we lessened our complicity and reclaimed power by working to make our community relations less transactional and our lives less taxable? What if we slowly divested from centralized systems and institutions and starved out their “narcissistic supply” by turning to each other more?
How can we let our hearts, instead of the state, lead us in redefining politics beyond elections, security beyond militarism, safety beyond policing, abundance beyond accumulation, and wealth beyond monetized capital? How do we reorient and expand the ways we nurture our collectivity so that we can build felt leverage beyond dialing up our volume or creating optics of change?
I explored a similar reframing of the climate crisis as a relational crisis in this past 3-part series, “Earth needs therapy,” in which I ask:
“What if instead of fixating on carbon emissions, we took a pulse on the intimacy and state of our relationships with community and with place—and tracked that as a gauge of healing ourselves and Earth?”
To come full circle in what feels more like an ongoing spiral, rather than feeling stuck from perfectionism and wanting my essays to each feel “complete” on their own, I am going to start seeing them all as open loops and loose threads — to be woven together with past pieces and then later unraveled again or broken down further in future musings. To be continued.
Other updates:
Join us in ~alchemize~, Green Dreamer’s 10-week audio-based program of daily imagination and creative practices — an experimental invitation to disrupt status quo ways of thinking, relating, sensing, and being.
Check out our collaboration giveaway of enrollment into both ~alchemize~ & Advaya’s course Wisdoms of Water
Learn more about Wisdoms of Water, a course hosted by Advaya (use “GREENDREAMER-THRIVE” for 30% off Advaya platform memberships or “GREENDREAMER20” for single course enrollments)
Latest Green Dreamer episodes:
Rising up to true climate justice, ft. Hamza Hamouchene
Sitting with the wisdoms of darkness, death, and decay, ft. Perdita Finn
Enlivening our responsiveness to the world through listening, ft. AM Kanngieser
Palestinian seeds of shelter, survival, subversiveness, ft. Vivien Sansour
Who does ‘fair trade’ really serve and benefit? ft. Lindsay Naylor
You may also enjoy…