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A psychedelic journey, a radical strategy and perfect timing. How the world's fastest-growing climate movement was made
The lifelong activist had spent decades working on an array of social justice campaigns, but few of them had gained much in the way of lasting traction. In order to bring about real, radical change, Bradbrook felt like something inside her consciousness needed to be unlocked.
So the reluctant flier traveled to the jungle-covered mountains of Costa Rica, thousands of miles away from her home in England's leafy countryside, for a psychedelic retreat.
In the space of two weeks, she ingested a flood dose of Iboga, a tree bark used to induce visions; took Kambo, the poisonous secretion of a giant tree frog hailed for its healing powers; and had experiences with ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew. All have been used in indigenous cultures for centuries as part of Shamanic spiritual rituals.
Bradbrook recalls being terrified but determined to push herself to the limit and divine a greater sense of purpose. During an ayahuasca ceremony one evening, she offered up a prayer calling on the universe to show her the "codes for social change."
Two years later, Extinction Rebellion was born.
When you take an activist without a cause, add drugs, clever marketing and a determination to not let truth get in the way of a good story, you get .....
Extinction Rebellion has distinguished itself from other environmental movements in several ways -- not least in their apocalyptic language. By virtue of its very name, the group is emphasizing the existential threat posed to humanity by the climate crisis, and suggesting that major social and system-wide change is the only way to alter the planet's current trajectory.
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down.
^I'm alarmed by the language, too, having no patience for any of these movements. I understand and accept them as part of the human experience, much as I do religion, but I wouldn't want that fundamentalist psychiatry supporting my ideas.
Here's the problem: the lack of principle is so great when it comes to politics at the moment, the energy of psychiatric cases from a Trump and his fan base to a rabid far leftist is considered gold. The nuttier the more driven, so the singular political skill of the day has become inciting and herding the unstable and extreme.
Staying mature enough to not react to the understandable passion of young people, and to not despise the elderly for their understandable fear vote, all the while refusing to entertain the unstable of any stripe (and this includes many a driven but unfit billionaire), takes some level of determination.
The challenge of our time is to maintain a healthy independence even as the new mobs push and pull and undermine reason at every turn, and politics becomes increasingly fascist in its efforts to incite, simplify, divide and drown out. But this demands more self awareness than ever before because the self not only continues to be highly vulnerable to self deception and justification, but it is a sucker for needing to belong at all costs.
Unless a serious new force in politics emerges, the end result of billionaire-mob rule can surely only mean what its incarnations throughout history have always meant. There was a brief break from this as the left moved on from its once authoritarian association with mobs while retaining some capacity to be elected. But that just allowed the right to return to its old ways of harnessing the mob through out-hate.
One can only hope a sane electable alternative is brewing somewhere.
^If you're going to have more nuclear, the geopolitically- and geographically-stable Australia makes far more sense than Japan, which is about the stupidest place on earth to build nuclear. If the terrorism factor and waste issues can be dealt with, I'm partly okay with it. But its nastiness goes well beyond nuclear risks; its hidden risk is economic, as it is a long-term investment with its own corrupt lobbying forces.
In other words, even as a stop gap it will become its own new corrupt anti-competitive market that allows Coalition lobbyists to simply swap to a new menace, scuppering alternative energy.
The 'energy-as-appliance' future, which will be a much more open and competitive market in the best of the capitalist tradition, and less subject to corrupt dealing and political capture, is far closer than the propaganda claims.
Wokko wrote:Lighten up mate, it's a political cartoon. If you want essays then social media and forums isn't the place for it.
No, it's effectively just another Weasel Meme so you can claim exactly that and avert critique. We've seen it too many times before. Perhaps it's do reflexive you don't even know you're doing it.
I'll endeavour to write more long winded irrelevant crap that nobody engages with. Nothing like a trail of dead threads to really keep a discussion board fresh.
^ Precisely the kind of thing you have to take into consideration with nuclear energy. The chance of an explosion might be 1 in 1000 (or even much less). But if it happens, the consequences are far-reaching to say the least.
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange
Australia is very stable though, the problem with Fukushima is that it was on the coast near a faultline. The other one that's brought up is Chernobyl which was early gen Soviet technology staffed by people living under communism. Australia would have a modern reactor, nowhere near an earthquake or tsunami area staffed by well paid experts. We'd be no less safe than France or Germany.
What's the point of sharing one blog post that you technically don't understand about a topic you generally don't understand that has serious academic debate elsewhere that you haven't bothered consulting or sharing?
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