New Left Review: Zion Lights, Hot Earth Rebels

Yes. Its precursor was a group called Rising Up, started eighteen months before by some long-standing direct-action campaigners. There was Gail Bradbrook, who’d been involved in environmental campaigns since she was a teenager and had led anti-fracking protests around Stroud in Gloucestershire. There was Simon Bramwell, a builder and bush-craft teacher, who founded the Stroud-based Compassionate Revolution group in 2015 with Gail and George Barda, an Occupy and Greenpeace activist. Roger Hallam was studying civil disobedience at King’s College, London; originally he’d been an organic farmer in Wales, but he could see the impact of climate change on his crops and began reading up about it. Clare Farrell was a fashion designer, she does a lot of xr’s art work—the block printing, for example. Robin Boardman was a student from Bristol, a bit younger than the rest. [...]

The starting point was the need to find a more effective form of protest than what we’d all been doing to date. Pretty much none of this came out of our own innovative thinking. It was about looking at the research, adding up the facts. Conventional A-to-B marches don’t work: millions of us demonstrated against the Iraq War and it didn’t make any difference. A key piece of research was Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s Why Civil Resistance Works. They take data from hundreds of 20th-century social movements and analyse what they did right and what they did wrong. The most successful ones, those that had their demands met, used forms of decentralized, non-violent civil disobedience—large-scale direct action. The tipping-point, Chenoweth and Stephan found, was to get 3.5 per cent of the population involved. That’s not a huge number—it’s about two million in the uk. But it’s not just about getting them to demonstrate, because unfortunately that doesn’t make any difference. It’s about getting them involved at a higher level. If two million people bring the capital city to a stand-still, what can the government do? They can’t arrest that many people. We saw that in the April and October Rebellions this year: even when the number of people arrested was in the thousands, the police and the judicial system were overwhelmed. [...]

Number one is for the government to tell the truth about the climate and ecological emergency; we need the state to mobilize all-out, like in war-time, to halt the crisis. The second demand is to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2025 and to halt bio-diversity loss—the 2019 ibpes Report on bio-diversity says that one in seven species is now at risk of extinction. Third, a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice, to decide which policies to push forward. This would be a jury-like structure, chosen by lot to get a cross-section of society. Parliament will remain, but it will play an advisory role to the Citizens’ Assembly.

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The Guardian: There is an antidote to demagoguery – it’s called political rewilding

In Finland, on the day of our general election, Boris Johnson’s antithesis became prime minister: the 34-year-old Sanna Marin, who is strong, humble and collaborative. Finland’s politics, emerging from its peculiar history, cannot be replicated here. But there is one crucial lesson. In 2014, the country started a programme to counter fake news, teaching people how to recognise and confront it. The result is that Finns have been ranked, in a recent study of 35 nations, the people most resistant to post-truth politics. [...]

But this is the less important task. The much bigger change is this: to stop seeking to control people from the centre. At the moment, the political model for almost all parties is to drive change from the top down. They write a manifesto, that they hope to turn into government policy, which may then be subject to a narrow and feeble consultation, which then leads to legislation, which then leads to change. I believe the best antidote to demagoguery is the opposite process: radical trust. To the greatest extent possible, parties and governments should trust communities to identify their own needs and make their own decisions. [...]

But in some parts of the world, towns and cities have begun to rewild politics. Councils have catalysed mass participation, then – to the greatest extent possible – stepped back and allowed it to evolve. Classic examples include participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre in Brazil, the Decide Madrid system in Spain, and the Better Reykjavik programme in Iceland. Local people have reoccupied the political space that had been captured by party machines and top-down government. They have worked out together what their communities need and how to make it happen, refusing to let politicians frame the questions or determine the answers. The results have been extraordinary: a massive re-engagement in politics, particularly among marginalised groups, and dramatic improvements in local life. Participatory politics does not require the blessing of central government, just a confident and far-sighted local authority.

statista: Venezuela Is Fast Becoming World's Biggest Refugee Crisis

According to UN data, Venezuela is fast becoming the world's biggest refugee crisis. By the end of 2020, 6.5 million Venezuelans are expected to have been forcibly displaced outside of their home country. This is up from just 300,000 in 2017. Syria, the biggest global refugee crisis to date, reached its height in 2018 with 6.7 million displaced people. With resettlement programs ongoing, that number is expected to have been reduced to 5.6 by the end of 2019 and might further fall in 2020.

While the number of Syrian refugees and those in a refugee-like situation had been rising since 2011, Venezuelan refugee numbers jumped up quickly, testing the preparedness of humanitarian organizations in the region.

Brookings Institution, which analyzed the data, notes that compared to the Syrian crisis, the Venezuela refugee situation is severely underfunded, putting the lives of hundred thousands of people at risk because of the lack of food and medical assistance.

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Beautiful News Daily: Suicides in Russia Are at 50-Year Low

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Lapham’s Quarterly: How to Survive Winter

A heat wave is unpleasant and can be deadly, but low temperatures pose a far greater threat to life. Protection from this danger required humans to mobilize their powers of invention. For generations, winter’s icy embrace posed an enormous challenge. What can people eat when there’s nothing to harvest? How can they keep from freezing to death? And how can they move from one place to another when snow blocks every path and road? Answers to these stark questions represent many of civilization’s grand achievements. Having enough to eat, for example: from drying apples and pears to smoking fish and meat, pickling vegetables, canning plums, and curing bacon, nearly all techniques for preserving food emerged to help adapt to winter. The cold also fueled the development of heating and insulation systems. For vast stretches of time, the common way to heat an indoor space was simply to light an open fire. Stone fireplaces first emerged in the eighth century. By 1200 an efficient masonry oven was a fixture not only in monasteries and castles but in many private residences as well. While the subsequent centuries brought improvements in ovens, the underlying technology had its limits. One eighteenth-century aristocrat, Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, Duchess of Orléans, left a vivid account of an insufficient oven in the otherwise sumptuous palace of Versailles. “It is such a fierce cold that it cannot be expressed,” she wrote on January 10, 1709, in a letter to Sophia of Hanover. “I sit by a large fire, have screens in front of the doors, have a sable around my neck, a bearskin wound about my feet, and for all the good that does I am shivering with the cold and can barely hold my quill. In all the days of my life I have never lived through a winter as raw as this one; the wine freezes in the bottles.” [...]

Heating systems went along with another technique for softening winter’s sting: keeping the cold out. When people first began to build small windows in their dwellings, they covered them with animal skins or linen designed to let in at least some light while retaining as much warmth as possible. Later, wooden shutters could seal windows when winter storms raged outside. Windowpanes were reserved for churches until well into the twelfth century and were considered the height of luxury for long afterward. If it got too cold, the solution for millennia was simply to seek refuge in bed: an entire family, along with their servants and guests, might find mutual warmth under the covers. Hanging curtains to create canopy beds or even building alcove beds into the wall provided another layer of heat-trapping protection. [...]

While winter offered certain pleasures, the idea that a winter landscape could be beautiful remained a rare sentiment for centuries. Snow, ice, and glaciers evoked negative associations. Traveling through the mountains during winter was dangerous, and people simply avoided it unless their obligations as tradesmen or pilgrims required it. It took a revolution in perception to make the wintry wilderness appealing. In the late eighteenth century a new obsession with nature as “wild” and “sublime” swept through much of the Western world. Mountains with snow-crowned peaks no longer seemed solely threatening—they also exerted an irresistible fascination. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, always ahead of his time, embodied this shift. He wrote about his Eislust, or passion for ice, which fed both his interest in mountains and his love of skating. In addition to local winter excursions into Germany’s Harz region, he made three trips to Switzerland’s majestic Gotthard Pass, starting in November 1779. Unlike the vast majority of Gotthard travelers, Goethe was not primarily interested in passing from one side of the Alps to the other. Instead he felt magically drawn to the “jagged ice cliffs” of the Rhône Glacier and the “vitriol-blue chasms” he glimpsed there. At the same time, the famous man of letters appreciated civilization’s adaptation to the winter. He became a particular fan of the Swiss masonry oven: “Indeed, it is most delightful to sit upon it, which in this country, where the stoves are made of stone tiles, it is very easy to do.”

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