Summary:
We must practice caution during our transition from our global petroculture, not based on the motivation, but on the underlying false assumptions and strategies that perceived sustainability agendas offer. At this juncture of geopolitical, ecological, social, and corporeal catastrophes, we must critically question clean/green solutions such as the erroneously-named renewable energies revolution. I suggest we face both the roots and the implications of how perceived solutions to our climate crisis, like allegedly renewable energies, may unintentionally sustain ecological devastation and global wealth inequities, and actually divert us from establishing long-term, regenerative infrastructures. However well-intentioned, these supposed alternatives to fossil fuel-addicted economies, perpetuate hegemonic violence of wasteful behavior and destructive infrastructures through green colonialism. Within this corporate-led consumerism and techno-euphoria, individualism is valorized, while intimacy is vilified. As with climate-crisis injustices, communities that are the least responsible for converging calamities are the hardest hit. Recognizing, designing, and implementing emancipatory interrelationships co-creates humane infrastructures for every social system—including cross-cultural and biomimicry models as well as private-public border crossings in the tiny home movement. Through an urgent commitment to creative-waste collaborations, we can transform corporate-capitalism’s everyday violence—consumption and entitlement—creating a bridge between corporate accountability, infrastructural change, and individual response-ability. Transitioning from our ethnocentric, xenophobic Anthropocene Era (plutocrat-driven corporatocracies embedded in bacteria-phobia, commercialized-childhood, extractive industries, GMOs) into a biosynergistic social permaculture requires an embodied awareness of interdependency rooted in the Commons. This is a foundation for the Ecozoic Era—Thomas Berry’s concept that humans can share mutually-beneficial relationships with the world around us: intellectually, structurally, and spiritually.
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