Hi,
This week, the best meteor shower of the year – the Perseids – reaches its peak.
Meteor showers, shooting stars, are one of nature’s most magical phenomena. In stories and songs, shooting stars are often used as a caricature of naive optimism, a deus ex machina to make wishes come true without doing any of the work necessary.
In the real world, though, meteor showers are probably even more amazing. Meteors are tiny grains of sand and dust that have been orbiting the sun for billions of years. When they hit the Earth’s atmosphere, they are rapidly heated and vaporise in less than a second – and then become part of the Earth itself. These specks of dust have helped steer the course of evolution of life on Earth. They’ve made us what we are today.
This week’s good news on climate
Like the tiny grains of sand and dust that will create this week’s meteor shower, each of us are on a unique journey that will have consequences far beyond anything we could ever imagine.
On our own, our actions are small but they can have enormous and brilliant effects, especially when we join forces. A flourishing world is not possible unless we all act in solidarity with each other and recognise our essential and indispensable connection to a shared project that is bigger than ourselves.
This week, Progressive International has published an ecological approach to organising a post-growth society focused on conservation both of the natural world and of the spirit that makes us human. It’s a bold, wide-ranging document that goes far beyond typical conservation strategies, right to the very heart of why we’re here on the planet.
According to the guide, to build a sustainable world we’ve got to employ "diverse strategies, adapted to particular locales, including both new articulations of long-standing practices such as buen vivir, ubuntu and swaraj, and perspectives arising from industrial societies such as ecosocialism, ecofeminism, and degrowth". In short, we’ve got to utterly transform our world in a geological blink of an eye.
We’ve only got one shot at it, and I for one intend to go down trying in a blaze of glory.
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