Join the Haslingfield and Harlton Eco Group at our AGM April 2nd, 8 pm at Wisbey’s Yard Community Room to be part of the conversation.
It’s been a bruising 3 months for me. I have family still living in the US, people now at risk from job and funding cuts, not to mention cruel and inhumane executive orders. I’m scared for the fate of Europe if Trump continues to appease Putin or enacts his punitive tariffs. The climate and environmental news continues to be mostly discouraging. On my bad days I have a sort of grim daydream playing in my head, which goes like this:
I’m stuck on a congested motorway. All of us on this motorway know – the signs keep telling us – that it leads, somewhere ahead, to a bottomless cliff. We’ve also noticed that the slip roads are becoming fewer and farther apart and the tarmac cracked and potholed. We’re seeing piles of rubbish everywhere. Part of us thinks it’s time to get off.
The car radio is full of conflicting advice, though. Some voices do say, “Get off, as quick as you can!” and tell sad stories of people who have already fallen over the cliff. But others joke about the “cliff hoax,” or distract us with entertainment. Even more confusingly, some voices admit that the cliff exists but tell us we’re still best off staying on the road. “I’m not a cliff-denier,” they say, “but better to stay with the route you know.”
Our guts, when we let ourselves listen, tell us that doesn’t make sense, and this isn’t a hoax. But when we look around, everyone else’s eyes are on the road. We feel like if we could just connect with everyone, we could make sense of all this and could just stop. Back up. Turn around somehow.
But we’re not 100% sure. And the traffic keeps moving. And so we keep going. Faster and faster. Darker and darker.
When I look around my actual community, I see smart, clued-up, kind-hearted and responsible people. And it occurs to me that, so responsible are they, they might be compared to bus drivers on this lost highway. They have a job to do, and it’s to get this busload of people – their family, their community, their place of work - safely down the road. As we’ve already seen, the road is tricky. The information near useless. The pressure high and the options few. And all those people on the bus – maybe their children, grandchildren, aging parents, teammates, friends, lovers – are counting on them. It takes everything they have to keep the bus going safely and the folks calm and happy.
But we’re all still heading straight for the cliff.
This scenario really resonates with me. Like so many others, I feel in my bones that our society, if not all of human civilisation, is on a road to disaster – whether via climate change, spreading autocracy, war and other violence, pandemics, economic breakdown, or all of the above combined into what many are calling the metacrisis.
But it is, of course, not the full picture. We are not stuck on motorways. We exist within real communities, and communities, from the dawn of human existence, have worked together to solve problems.
Once we remember that we belong to communities, and can talk to each other, we can organise.
Once we come together, we can start to decide on the next steps which will lead to resilience and hope.
Will that make the cliff go away? No, not for a while anyway. Will it stop those who continue down the road from pushing themselves and others over it? Maybe, if enough people take part.
Will it even “save” us and our busloads of loved ones?
The evidence is pretty clear. When people have to, they are very good at organising themselves out of trouble. Problem solving is our superpower, and since our systems are preventing us from exercising that as a joined-up population, we need to exercise it in smaller groups - at the street, neighbourhood, parish, county, town or city level. But we can’t do that while we’re on the motorway, pedal to the metal, and all our energy focused on keeping that bus on the move. Some energy needs to go into inventing a future that avoids the road and cliff at the end of it.
The journey of learning I’ve been on, since 2015 when I read Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything, has shown me that there are great ideas out there for how to get onto a new and better path. We don’t know which will work. But I for one am ready to start trying.
At the AGM, after a very brief bit of committee business and some inspirational input, we’ll be brainstorming ideas for projects/talks/activities to help our community become more resilient. Where there’s energy behind these ideas, we will make them happen. Do join us!
Michelle Golder
Chair