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- Commentary
- Preserving our sanity amidst the consuming madness of the times
- Removing the mask of the insecure babyman
- The internet: from digital democracy to digital dementia
- Doubt as an asset, certainty as an affliction
- Fascism, collective insanity and ourselves
- Navigating disinformation, uncertainty, individualism and the poison apple of conspiracy
- If nothing changes nothing will change: the Voice referendum
- What can we learn from disaster communities?
- New year, a time to embrace the uncertainty of it all
- We could be non-binary
- Adaptive resilience vs safety paternalism
- Left wing, right wing? What just happened to politics?
- Covid, class and the addiction to certainty
- Neoliberalism, the Life World and the Psychopathic Corporation
- Democracy is about our bodies, not just our minds
- What’s your motivation: is it yourself or the change you’re making?
- Mind over matter: The world of abstraction is driving us to destruction
- The real threats to our liberty and survival
- Avoiding the abyss of conspiracy theories
- The difference between a legal system and a fantasy novel
- What’s a conspiracy and what’s just common garden variety corruption?
- Unpredictability, humility and an emerging anthropandemic
- The trilemma – climate change, economic collapse, and rising fascism
- Happy New Normal for the decade ahead
- The race to the bottom in australian politics
- Fires, liars and climate deniers
- Talking about lock-on devices – an article in ‘The Conversation’
- The Ponzi scheme is teetering
- Regenerative culture a key part of the blockade experience
- Staying sane in the late Anthropocene
- Extinction Rebellion
- Major parties have failed on climate, it’s time to rebel.
- Elections In The Late Anthropocene
- It is the Greens that are defeating the Nats and it’s all about your preferences
- Australia’s powerhouse of democracy and innovation is in the Northern Rivers
- Is identity politics a problem for the left?
- The climate emergency and the awful state of Australian politics
- Democracy and rights under threat in corporate police state
- Liberty, freedom and civil rights? Do any of us understand these things anymore.
- The forest wars are back, time to mobilise
- …more commentary
- Workshops
- News & Events
- Media
- A Flood of Emotions – Sydney Ideas Event
- Participatory democracy in the COVID era – SCU podcast
- Activism educator Aidan Ricketts explains how and why protests can be peaceful
- Bob Brown Is Taking “Shocking” Anti-Protest Laws To The High Court
- Anti protest laws could arrest nannas, seize tractors
- “They blinked first”
- Colin Barnett quick to protest against ‘activism degrees’ – The Australian, 16/10/2014
- ‘Degrees in activism’ put brake on growth – The Australian, 15/10/2014
- Magistrate throws out vexatious police case against CSG protesters
- Outrage over school PR ‘by stealth’- The Northern Star
- CSG clash a certainty
- Communities use new tactics
- Gas group attacks lecturer
- …more media
- Activist Resources
- Reviews
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I like these sites
Community Organisations
- Code Green Tasmania
- CSG Free Northern Rivers
- Friends of the Earth Melbourne
- Generation Alpha
- Huon Valley Environment Centre
- Lock the Gate Alliance
- Nature Conservation Council NSW
- North Coast Environment Council
- North East Forest Alliance
- Plan to Win
- Rainforest Information Centre
- Save our Foreshore
- Still Wild Still Threatened
- The Change Agency
- The Wilderness Society
Activism and social movements, an eternal part of human evolution
We can reflect positively on the great shifts in social awareness on issues like feminism, the environment and sexual diversity since the 1970’s or we can wring our hands in dismay at the destructiveness of neo-liberalism over the same period. There is no end point to history, no place where we get to find out who won and who lost, it’s not even about that, it’s all just ongoing evolution for better or for worse however we each define those things. It can actually get better and worse simultaneously.
Whether we are aware of it or not we are all taking actions every day that contribute to changing the world into the future, so we may as well all consciously come to understand that we are all activists. The more we understand that all of our actions and choices are having an effect, however small, the more effective and empowered we can become.
The work of activists will never be finished, in every age there will be destructive and decaying power structures to struggle against and replace, and new opportunities for growth and social evolution to pursue. Strangely enough the solution to one problem will often also contain the seeds of the next challenge.
And so it is in this time that we the people not just in Australia but across the globe are facing off against the entrenched economic and political power of the decaying fossil fuel empire. We fight locally through Gasfield Free Northern Rivers, nationally through Lock the Gate and globally through a vast complex movement of people, organisations, scientists and even political and religious leaders to move us from the fossil fuel age into a more sustainable future.
The vast wealth and the massive wars of the American century were built upon a contest to control the fuel that supplied the energy that humanity relies upon. But the technological revolution of renewable energy is now disrupting the political economy of fossil fuel, in fact threatening to make fuel itself a largely redundant part of the energy equation.
It can look so bleak at times as we face the climate deniers, the Murdoch press and the desperate backward looking politics of our federal government. Coal mines are massively subsidised, renewable energy is being actively discouraged. The state governments are introducing new anti-protest laws to try to stave off the epidemic of protest against gas and coal projects.
Everywhere we look it’s democracy and sustainability vs the fossil fuel industry, but the signs are actually quite hopeful. The fossil fools are falling into a protective phalanx of lies, denial, subsidies and counter attack, whilst outside their castle walls there is great activity, change and enthusiasm.
Society is ultimately an ecological system and change is constant. Our great social movements are at their best when they strategically disrupt dysfunctional old ways of being and spawn outpourings of creativity to bring about change. We can all play our part in this change as individuals and as social movements.
Survival can only ever be achieved through an enthusiasm for constant change. Conservatism and rigidity is a highway to obsolescence and senescence. We need to learn to feel comfortable in a life time of constant activism, in a millennium of constant activism for our work will never be complete, we are here to keep helping the collective to evolve and adapt.
First published in The Nimbin Good Times, August, 2015.