Breaking the Ouroboros and Ushering in New Possibilities
Also catalogued elsewhere
Ruth Taylor emphasizes the need to rethink our approaches to social and environmental justice, urging activists to slow down and reflect on their strategies. She argues that current methods often reinforce the very systems they aim to change, creating a cycle of ineffective responses. To create meaningful change, we must address the underlying values that separate humanity from nature and focus on interconnectedness rather than competition.
In this time of worsening crises, we need to slow down to ensure our strategies for change are not doing more harm than good.
what we have tried before and what we continue to centre, has not worked – cannot work – and so we need to transmogrify our efforts to be what is required in these days of pain and horror; to break the ouroboros and welcome in new possibilities.
We adopt the logic of ‘one thing at a time’ and apply it to the complex and inherently interconnected nature of the crises we face, unintentionally creating an environment of competition (“climate change is the most important challenge of our time”, “no, poverty is the most important” etc etc) and missing the truth found in the convergence.
Modernity itself is predicated on unending expansiveness, fixated on a story of continuous ‘progress’, all while residing on a finite planet with finite resources. It also is completely dependent on violence
no amount of tweaks at the surface level will ever amount to a world where all life on Earth is considered and treated as worthy simply by the fact that it exists. This is true at the very same time that tweaks to the system as it stands now are completely necessary in order to alleviate suffering in the present.
How can we do what is best for all life in today’s world, operating within the logic systems, values and social norms of now, whilst not unintentionally reinforcing these same ways of seeing and understanding the world for the future that we want to see come to fruition? It strikes me that the common success metrics and data-proven strategies found in the campaigning of today could very much be a poisoned chalice, undercutting our efforts in the long term.
Centring an economic argument not only sets us up to fail, but more than this, it is corrosive to strengthening the values on which pro-environmental actions and attitudes depend.
by doing so, we add further fuel to the fire of the current cultural imaginary that money and status are king and that there is no alternative
To work to make the world better is to unpick the harms found at the deepest levels, all while being complicit in those same harms. We can do this by becoming conscious of the underlying values and logics we are reinforcing in our work today – simultaneously, having an eye on the present and an eye to the future.
we need to create together different work which intentionally and explicitly has, as its focus, the need to respond to the crisis of values and the deep separation between human beings and nature.