Alternative Editorial: What Could Possibly Be New About 2022?
New Year’s Day is a kind of luxury. We allow ourselves the perspective of looking back at the year past and forwards into the year ahead. The space and time to feel into history as we are making it. To check into our capacity for stepping up. However briefly, we grant ourselves the agency to make change happen.
For one precious moment we can gain a perspective that is often missing in the ensuing headless rush towards the goals we set.
But when we lose this aerial view, how do we deliver on our promises to ourselves? When the obstacles of each day present themselves as insurmountable? When we get tired and stressed due to overload and ambition? When the reality we are trying to change shows itself to be ever more deeply entrenched and we ourselves are entangled in its workings?
We are three years into the decade that most of our readers – you – accept is a crucial one for the survival of the human species on Earth. We accept the need to radically change our ways of living: consumption and travel habits as well as our interdependency with the rest of the globe. Most of us reading believe a new kind of democracy must be forged to tap into the agency of citizens everywhere. Many agree that some form of cosmolocal, community action is needed to move us into a more regenerative culture.
Writing from the UK, it seems clear that, in the global North, we are both privileged and responsible. Meaning, we are living off the spoils of our extractive actions all over the planet - exploiting resources of both minerals and labour in the Southern Hemisphere.. And therefore we must develop our ability to respond to the ecological and economic crises we have caused on behalf of everyone. Of course, others play their part in the complex causation. But we must look first to ours.
This is especially true because for the time being, in this part of the world, we are still free to act in ways that can make a real difference (in the time we have). As John F Kennedy said “the time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining”. For us, that time is now.
Yes, maybe we - in this community - can see what others can’t. But is shouting at people to change their thinking the best use of our energy? Particularly when the moderate weather we experience in everyday lives seems to contradict grander calls to action? Or could we better get on with building the tools, vehicles and mechanisms we are going to need further into this decade, when (literally) the heat will be on the wider population? When they will be reaching, unprecedentedly, for the tools of survival?
As recent history has shown us, again and again, revolution can be self-defeating—if you are not ready to use the uprising and energy for re-birth it releases, in a constructive way. The Arab Spring was a remarkable feat, unseating the long rule of President Hosni Mubarak in just over two months of protests in Tahrir Square. Yet without the grassroots organising needed to give rise to an alternative socio-political system in the aftermath, Egypt has slowly returned to its formerly repressive ways, with human rights at its lowest ebb for years. What might have happened if they were ready for transformation?
Empowered to act
How does that question—are we ready for transformation—translate into plans for our year ahead? At The Alternative UK we have three clear objectives that we have been pursuing for over four years, with your work at the core.
The first is the convening of a new socio-political system. This means noticing, engaging with and making connections between emerging initiatives that hold the seeds of regeneration—particularly for our dysfunctional party political system, and for our beleaguered planet. We called this activity The Elephant, referring to the parable of the blind men and the elephant. None of us can really see the whole glorious animal – or the new system – on our own. So A/UK convenes the rooms and discussions for people to listen to each other, each describing a different part of what is coming into view.
Secondly we have been prototyping cosmolocal, community agency networks (CANs). These are place based, intentionally diverse groups of people who are building containers for regenerative citizen activity. Our fortnightly online meet-up of co-creators is a place for sharing tools, methods and visions. You can also meet leaders from other CANs movements – Transition, Ecovillages, Co-operatives – to find common ground.
Thirdly we have been producing the Daily / Weekly Alternative – a strongly editorialised media space that reflects back, and often amplifies, the good work we have observed. We do this in a way that helps previously disconnected projects connect to each other, seeing a bigger picture of change. Meanwhile, the mainstream media remains invested in the current socio-economic-political system killing our planet, reporting the news through (small c) conservative frames and adopting the divisive narratives they pedal. They rarely report on – and often belittle – the work of grassroots innovation and diverse forms of intelligence.
The need for a media that is willing to explore, appreciate, challenge and accelerate the possibilities for transformation opening up at this time is urgent. People who are ‘waking up’ to any aspect of these socio-political-economic-psychological tasks, and feel the urge to act on them, really need encouragement and belonging. They need access to the evidence that millions of others the world over are engaged in the same endeavour—often without pay or thanks. Instead, if their sources are the daily news headlines and the social media spinning off that, feelings of powerlessness and futility are inevitable. And this is what drives us.
It’s not easy to shift this. Until now, the most avid of those who read A/UK are often time-poor entrepreneurs, funnelling all their energy and resource into their own projects, with little time or money to give to us. They read and appreciate – the numbers are always growing from week to week – but rarely contribute.
In addition, we’ve found that too many philanthropists will measure the impact being made on the current system – whether media coverage or numbers generated – rather than invest in the smaller patterns of very new activity.
Do the right thing, at the right time
Yet a good sign that there is a growing appetite for our theory of change was A/UK co-initiator Indra Adnan’s book - The Politics of Waking Up – making it to the Times Literary Supplements list of Books of the Year. With no reference to the growing CANs movement in the pages of The Times daily edition yet, the popular demand is nevertheless growing. We need to meet it – all of us.
In this New Year moment, we at A/UK can only hold our poise and our nerve. We’re been looking back at the almost five years of scaffolding for the social architecture to come. And we’re looking forward to the onrushing deadlines of 2030, by which time our societies need to be in full regenerative mode. Rather than succumb to the difficulties of the everyday, we should – all of us – allow the sweep of history, the pull of impending crisis, to show us our ways ahead. We should respond to growing needs, rather than to the permission – in the form of grants — to go ahead. Only by standing in that perspective, for every day of 2022, will we become ready to meet the crisis adequately. And be ready to use the resources well when they are eventually released: which they will be.
So rather than scale down, we will be stepping up again this year. We’ll have a clear focus that will articulate itself over the next couple of months to manifest on our 5th Birthday on March 1st. Each of our three foci will take a new form: the Elephant will take form as a socio-political festival (beginning to take shape as we write). The CANs prototyping will shift into the CAN of CANs – helping to give rise to a global commons of regenerative activity. And the Daily/Weekly Alternative will join with other solutions-oriented journalistic initiatives to design a new media system. One to which you can all upload your own initiatives and read back enlivening narratives about where the new power lies.
It’s going to be fun, so bring your friends along. Invest, invest, invest – your time, your creativity and yes, your money. We promise you the dividend of hope, growth of the generative kind and that irreplaceable feeling that you are doing the right thing, at the right time.