Preparing for the end of the world as we know it – Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures
https://decolonialfutures.net/portfolio/preparing-for-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/
Within modernity-coloniality, initiatives addressing the climate crisis, like Transition Towns, Degrowth, 350 degrees, Doughnut Economics, Extinction Rebellion and Deep Adaptation, have approached differently the question of whether or not (and how) to talk about the potential, likelihood or inevitability of social and ecological collapse. This text is a contribution to conversations about this question. It presents a synthesis of the work of Indigenous scholars and activists who see the need to prepare for the incoming flood of challenges as the structures of modernity-coloniality begin to falter. It also offers a social cartography of patterns of analyses and propositions in climate change movements initiated in the West that could spark different insights and conversations about the tensions and limits of modern-colonial forms of debate, relationship building and existence. Drawing on an on-going conversation between the GTDF collective and the Deep Adaptation movement, the conclusion issues an invitation for the interruption of harmful desires and attachments to modernity-coloniality so that we can grow up and show up differently to the challenging work that we need to do together as we collectively face the gradual collapse of the house of modernity, or, in other words, the end of the world as we know it.
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In our collective, we have mapped four denials that severely restrict the capacity of those of us socialized within modernity-coloniality to sense, relate and imagine otherwise:
* the denial of systemic, historical and ongoing violence and of complicity in harm (the fact that our comforts, securities and enjoyments are subsidized by expropriation and exploitation somewhere else);
* the denial of the limits of the planet and of the unsustainability of modernity-coloniality (the fact that the finite earth-metabolism cannot sustain exponential growth, consumption, extraction, exploitation and expropriation indefinitely);
* the denial of entanglement (our insistence in seeing ourselves as separate from each other and the land, rather than “entangled” within a living wider metabolism that is bio-intelligent); and,
* the denial of the magnitude and the complexity of the problems we need to face together (the tendency to look for simplistic solutions that make us feel and look good and that may address symptoms, but not the root causes of our collective complex predicament)
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We therefore ask: What will it take for us to finally confront the depth and magnitude of the problems we face? How might we sit with our complicity in these problems, and interrupt our continued investments in the system that created those problems in the first place? What kind of intellectual, affective, and relational capacities and dispositions do we need to develop in order to hold space for the emergence of alternatives that are viable, but currently unfathomable? How can we learn to grow up, and show up differently – with humility, compassion, generosity, patience, and joy – to do the work that needs to be done, rather than what we want to do based on our projections, idealizations, and presumed entitlements and exceptionalisms? If genuinely original solutions cannot come from the dominant cultural paradigms that created the problems we face, what forms of education can interrupt these paradigms and support us to sense, relate and imagine otherwise? As Cree scholar Dwayne Donald points out: this is not an informational problem, but one rooted in a harmful habit of being, with both conscious and unconscious dimensions.