The Emergent Urgent

The Emergent Urgent, Photo by me.

I think it’s time we looked at time scales in terms of ‘doing’. The reality is the need for immediate change. Today. That everyone is not participating today is complex, but there’s real truth in urgency.

The use of the word ’emergency’ has been severely compromised. I have read on Twitter a defense of using the phrase ‘long emergency.’ A long emergency is about as useful as a flying brick,  a nonviable dialectic – AN OXYMORON. People need to understand the urgency, in mitigation and adaptation.

Western techno-industrial values, competition, fear, consequential life-styles and the general global devaluation of life for markets, that lead to habitat loss, emissions, poverty, racism, failing democracy, dictatorship, xenophobia, North-South divides, nationalism ~ please feel free to add more ~  are failing all living beings.

What we have are emerging urgencies, and we’d do well to articulate and address them.

One such Emergent Urgent is to spread the news that the globalized financial sector is not going to save lives. We must create a local, bioregional flow of support for one another and all life. We have to stop giving up our power, and giving Power excuses to wait or knock back decisions into the laps of our children and grandchildren.

Compassionate and immediate transitions are possible. COVID19 shows that immediacy is necessary, and can happen street to street. Successful countries have acted immediately and, in good part, compassionately. The same it is now on action to slow the Climate Bomb.

This is not apart from the moral imagination required in creating new/ancient world orders based on the ethics of care (in the natural sense), though we do need more. Lots more.

We already have a pool of understanding between us on some of the key changes forquired in all aspects of society, enough to begin (it’s already begun). But too many are holding on to the natural capitalist ethic, the ‘ecomodern’,  and new billionaire colonialism; perpetuation of capitalist failure ~ dominantly white, eurocentric and male. It’s harmful.

The response to the climate, ecological and human empathy/imagination crises (Earth Crisis), is The Emergent Urgent.

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