It’s a precious gift to be alive as a sentient human being whatever the circumstances, my Buddhist friends remind me. Yes, of course, I say. And the global pandemic is awful, causing premature deaths, suffering and loss for survivors, financial disaster for households and business owners. My Buddhist friends also remind me that there has always been suffering. Perhaps, making clear these fundamental truths of the human condition are the first two gifts of this pandemic.
For the longer-term praxis of living together and all that entails – politics, economics, sociologics, ecologics – this pandemic brings additional practical blessings. First, let’s acknowledge the critiques of globalised ‘capitalism’ and political duplicity, the warnings of impending authoritarianism and austerity, and the near certainty of massively disruptive and sustained economic contraction. These are foreboding stories told by very serious people coming through louder and clearer than before in a now more amenable mediasphere. (If you haven’t yet seen them, then please search for them.) We must give them thoughtful attention and act accordingly. But they’re not the only possible stories about an as yet unconstructed future – in fact, they’re incomplete.
Continue reading “This Pandemic Bears Gifts – new possibilities for economic transition”
To state the obvious, political and economic change happens in all kinds of ways including through crisis and calamity. For those of us working for change at local, municipal and regional scales, this is the moment when many of the solutions we’ve been promoting are needed and the conditions for building the foundations for longer term change are favourable. There’s much to explore on this topic, obviously, but let’s just focus on a few points which might inspire immediate action and kick off a continuing conversation in our wider community of changemakers, and especially here in the South West, UK.
Enterprising Ecosystems 