Alternative Editorial: Love Needs Architecture
It's Earth Day and the people that inhabit the earth are in peril. Sounds like a line from a Tolkien novel, yet who could deny its simple truth? Despite having the material, intellectual and spiritual (however you might interpret that) resources to generate a flourishing planet, humans are sabotaging their own survival.
From the global perspective in 2023, this looks like roughly eight billion people who are materially and psychologically fragmented—poorly organised to compete with each other, rather than co-operate. Even as we face the interrelated crises of environmental destruction, social division and loss of well-being, global elites are experimenting with an artificial intelligence capable of accelerating the world's implosion.
Some would say the Earth perspective is different from the Global perspective - the latter referring to the networks of human action, the way we have organised power and agency over the land we occupy. The Earth is more the home of nature: humans as life forms rather than creators, living alongside other sentient beings. Earth speaks more to long-term evolution. It conjures up the possibility that humans may well go extinct whileGaia re-organises.
Watching the events around Earth Day, we can see that many initiatives, gatherings - even movements - are willing to take an Earth perspective. In these spaces, nature's power and organisation is revered: its mycelial networks of connection and communication, its hive and pod-like organising in 'living cities', its essential coherence. There's an evocation of the beauty that arises from the rough - law of the jungle anyone? - harmony of all living things, co-operating in the interests of the whole ecology, flourishing together. Who can, or would want to, doubt that?
The human species in this environment is seen as being on a path of development - a race even - to 'become one' with nature. Especially its capacity to inter-relate across different species and forms of agency. There is a demand for individuals to 'move past the ego' and serve the greater whole by 'getting out of the way' of collective action and 'transformational fields'.
Our most important role, this perspective notes, is to steward spaces of regeneration – helping neighbourhoods, towns, cities and bioregions move into permaculture, into sustainable and self-sufficient ecosystems. Within this discourse, the development of this capacity is claimed to be powered, in human terms, by love. That the vast majority of people, living through our multiple crises, might not be able to experience - or even entertain – such a reality, is a challenge for our societies, small and large.
Some respond with a call to 'raise our consciousness': a vertical path that can intimate hierarchies of capability (sometimes denied, other times defended). Others see world of love as a spiritual dimension yet to be articulated well for those who don't relate easily. Still others see this as a feminine way of being and working - through family, community, tribes – for which men have to make more space in public life. Yet through most of the Earth Day events we participated in, love was a given, human attribute - a capacity we can always return to in order to enhance our future.
On the same day, in a different dimension arguably, we took part in The Big One - Extinction Rebellion's massive call out to people all over the UK, urged to take part in a protest action against the government. Tens of thousands of people marched around Westminster to make three core demands: Tell the Truth, Act Nowand Decide Together. As a development of their early demand for a Citizens Assembly on climate catastrophe, they are now demanding a citizen-led democracy to end the fossil fuel era, as well as a fair society that includes reparations.
XR’s protests brings forth a different kind of energy than the largely virtual Earth Day gatherings. Walking through the London streets, there was plenty of anger and loathing directed against those occupying the Mother of Parliaments in their midst. Banners and masks portrayed Tory ministers as the prime suspects - understandable after 12 years in government, where they failed to respond adequately to 12 COP sets of findings, recommending actions that were never properly implemented.
At the same time, a mark of XR's gatherings has always been a determinedly joyful community experience. Great emphasis has always been placed on playful and artistic expression, high energy music-and-dance - as if carnival was the way to face the climate void and call out a better future. Not unlike CND marches, people look as if they are purposively enjoying themselves in their attempt to avoid extinction.
Maybe as a result of that deeply embedded carnivalesque, there has also been some tactical evolution. In the past, XR actions were more extreme - disruption being the only effective tool for grabbing the attention of the media and government. Vulnerable people gluing themselves to doors and statues, or engines underneath cars and trucks, then forcibly removed and arrested.
However, in the Big One, organisers wanted to avoid too much upset. Making a distinction between XR and Just Stop Oil actions, they negotiated routes with the police. Ironically the press had missed the shift in tactics, reporting on an upcoming clash between the march and the marathon that never materialised. XR was trying to pay attention to what would be more popular and acceptable for the wider British public. Perhaps this is why the term “love” is beginning to appear in both their and Earth Day’s discourse?
However, that softening and humanising of their rhetoric and praxis may be why very little – indeed, less than ever - of these interventions were picked up by the mainstream press. When XR first launched, part of its rationale held that drama was required to get noticed. It has to bleed to lead. However, many individuals suffered from the consequences. On Day one of the Big One we heard that two protestors had got three years in prison for scaling a bridge on the Dartford Crossing.
Instead, what made the front page news was Dominic Raab resigning as a result of an independent report on his bullying behaviour in government. He departed calling the whole of the civil service into question by claiming complaints against him were the result of activist culture that prevents the government of the day from getting on with delivering policy. In so doing, Raab sowed the seeds for further distrust in our political system.
Having put his integrity on the line by promising to stand by the findings of the official report, he was bound to resign. However, it escapes his notice that, defying the findings of an independent report that didn't go his way, might be understood as the act of a bully. However, for the time being, Raab will no longer have his way with the civil service.
How might this petty-political outcome be perceived on Earth Day? Taking the wider, more evolutionary point of view, it points at a small shift in power relations. It's no longer acceptable or easy to treat junior colleagues without respect and dignity in daily work. It’s no longer permissible for those with power to abuse those without it. And it might point towards wider shifts in society - between men and women, between races and levels of income. Although all these distorted power relations are still overdue their wider rectifications.
These activists might say that the politics of love—taken as a form of commitment to the health of the whole planet, under conditions of extreme urgency--is winning the day. Yet without new stories and memes, new media, new structures and new tools and practices to carry such an intense and ultimate agency—which, until now, has lain buried in our socio-economic-political systems—this “love” cannot prevail. It’s a part of The Alternative Global’s commitment - now specifically through our four incubators - to provide its enabling conditions.
