Here's the tl:dr - The Paris Agreement and Extinction Rebellion are two sides (or symptoms) of the same coin, i.e. the suspension of critical faculties by people who know better but are in desperate search of reasons to be hopeful about our grim meathook future.... Back in 2015 I wrote a piece about the Paris... Continue Reading →
What might have been, but wasn’t
How it could have been (Starting on time instead of fifteen minutes late) Having someone clearly identified as welcome/way of making sure people who don’t know anyone know where to come to etc. Having a note taker Introductions Pairwise. "Sit with someone you don’t know. You are going to find out their name and what,... Continue Reading →
12 years a slave to the rhetoric
[Update 13 Jan 2019: hmm, this blog has been put somewhere on facebook and had some click throughs. Could someone share the link in the comments? Curious to see what/if any comments. ALSO, this latest post on this site may be of interest- "Infiltration and environmental movements - what is to be done?"] It's... Continue Reading →
Ehre heads. On the (f)utility of theory
Short post but hopefully not a shitpost. Went to a thing recently. There was a good 'sweeping overview' history of the twentieth century around Keynesianism/neoliberalism (though it undersold the importance of ICT and containerisation for my taste). Halfway through I scrawled to a colleague "Five quid says he says nothing/has nothing to say about 'what... Continue Reading →
Minor rant: Know your audience, tailor accordingly… #climate #activism
Okay, no names, but for god's sake, people who are giving talks on important subjects, often from a position of knowing a lot and/or having moral high ground: THINK WHO YOU ARE TALKING TO. Do NOT give your bog-standard intro-to-issue-x to a self-selected audience that has come out on a cold wet night/travelled to the... Continue Reading →
Is Capitalism unsustainable? The jury’s out-ish. Is ego-fodderfication unsustainable? Sadly not/hell yes.
I don’t know how much rethinking economics is actually going on (I have my suspicions, but no hard data). I do have a good idea of how much rethinking politics/academia/civilsocietying is going on, and it’s not much at all/zero. The latest piece of hard data came tonight, at the University of Manchester. The debate/discussion was... Continue Reading →
Event: “The Resilience of Unsustainability: Cultural Backlash, Authoritarian Reflex and the Great Regression” #TransitionImpossible
After last night’s keynote, tonight it was the turn of Professor Ingolfur Blühdorn, Institute for Social Change and Sustainability, WU Vienna to deliver a talk. His title was “The Resilience of Unsustainability: Cultural Backlash, Authoritarian Reflex and the Great Regression,” which is academic-speak for “Dudes, lemme say, we’re, like, totes fubarred” This blog post gives... Continue Reading →
Video Vox Pop – how I would do it, fwiw.
Recently I proposed that an organisation (I am a FIFO activist on this) organise some video vox pops around an event that they’re organising for about five weeks’ time. This post is how I would do it. (Or rather, how I like to believe that I would be able to do it. By now, pushing... Continue Reading →
Must the tail always wag the dog? Of activism and strategy.
Thinking strategically is very very hard. The normal activist mode is to move (or, uncharitably, lurch) from one ‘crucial’/urgent; upcoming event to the next. It might be a camp, or a march, or a submission to some government ‘consultation’. It might be a public meeting, the launch of a document, whatevs. You can spend literally... Continue Reading →
What we knew on #climate in 1971… #auspol
A couple of years ago the folks at the Conversation asked me to bash out a piece on what Australians knew about climate change in the late 60s, early 70s. I did an okay-ish job, but have since radically expanded my knowledge of that period. What we have below is not the first mention of... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 