Ecologies of Emergence: Avoiding Channeling Through Course Corrections

 All knowledge is provisional and evolving as it emerges in ecologies with a capacity for constant regeneration. This means it is possible to defect from the destructive adaptations of the status quo causing social, racial, and ecological crises, and imagine alternative ways of life. At the same time, the global systems of modernism/coloniality, like an octopus with many arms, will generally try to coopt and appropriate any new projects through commodifying, repackaging, marketing, and selling them in order to channel them back into the system of racial capitalism.  Modernist top-down systems of leadership, the attractions of power, wealth, prestige, and privilege, and the historic valuations of coloniality too often weigh heavily in habitual community, institutional, and organizational relationships, creating a formidable diversion.  Channeling practices aim to coopt resistance strategies and subsume possibilities for defection into systemic recognition and reward.  However, historically there have always been communities that have had the ability to foresee and avert the channel’s path, by choosing to move in alternative directions that favor life. Increasingly large groups of people are awakening to these realities and deciding to change course.

Such decisions require constant review of the current outcomes of collective actions to see where they are leading, and a willingness to revise and let go when they fail to produce desired relationships. In many places these critical check-ins happen through regular dialogical, divinatory, and ritual practices. They signal the importance of keeping our wits about us and recognizing the agency of the living world and its ancestral presence. This awareness involves opening to unimagined transformations in the process of creating alternatives to the economies, environments, and institutions that purposefully perform denial of evidence and care in the process of destroying life on earth. All over the world more and more people are awakening to the impossibility of continuing with the current global system and contributing to hopeful prefigurative projects reaching for change. Earth democracy is a framework for building a regenerative future based on thriving local economies, participatory governance, social justice, food sovereignty, and respect and responsibility for all our relations in the natural world that nurtures us.

Resource: Navdanya International

Environmental justice, degrowth and post-capitalist futures by Neera Singh