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<body><div style="text-align: left;">Anyone going to/aware of the bus protest tomorrow? 11 am at city hall. <br><br>first buses 'day saver' ticket will be 4 pound as of monday!<br><br>michelle<br></div><br><br><div><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 28pt;">
<p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: left;" align="left"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 28pt;"><font color="#990099" face="Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif" size="3">Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. <br>- </font><a href="http://www.freedomsnest.com/cgi-bin/qa.cgi?ref=kinmar"><font color="#990099" face="Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif" size="3"><span style="color: black; text-decoration: none;">Martin Luther King</span></font></a></span></p>
<span style="color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 28pt;"><font face="Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif"><font color="#c0b000"><br></font></font><hr id="stopSpelling"><font face="Geneva, Arial, Sans-serif"><font color="#c0b000">> From: paddygillet@hotmail.com<br>> To: 6193@yahoogroups.com; matilda@lists.aktivix.org; ssf@lists.aktivix.org<br>> Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2007 14:45:28 +0000<br>> Subject: [matilda] The Age of Mammals, by Rebecca Solnit<br>> <br>> A future history!<br>> <br>> <br>> ><br>> >This originally posted on the excellent www.tomdispatch.com on December 23, <br>> >2006.<br>> >enjoy & happy holidays<br>> >david<br>> ><br>> >http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=149598<br>> ><br>> >The Age of Mammals<br>> >Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century<br>> >By Rebecca Solnit<br>> ><br>> >[For Solomon Solnit (b. Oct. 18, 2006)]<br>> ><br>> >The View from the Grass<br>> ><br>> >I've been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since <br>> >2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up overlooked <br>> >stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year, we've decided <br>> >instead to look back on the last 25 years of the twenty-first century -- <br>> >but it was creatures from sixty million years ago who reminded me how to do <br>> >it.<br>> ><br>> >The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing <br>> >that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur <br>> >dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between <br>> >a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, <br>> >one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by <br>> >what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a <br>> >brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal <br>> >perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an <br>> >enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always <br>> >looks like that mammal at the beginning -- that's what I told the kids -- <br>> >inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the <br>> >clash of the titans.<br>> ><br>> >That's exactly why mainstream journalists spent the first decade of this <br>> >century debating the meaning of the obvious binaries -- the Democrats <br>> >versus the Republicans, McWorld versus Global Jihad -- much as political <br>> >debate of the early 1770s might have focused on whether the French or <br>> >English monarch would have supremacy in North America, not long before the <br>> >former was beheaded and the latter evicted. The monarchs in all their <br>> >splashy scale were the dinosaurs of their day, and the eighteenth-century <br>> >mammal no one noticed at first was named "revolution"; the early <br>> >twenty-first century version might have been called "localism" or maybe <br>> >"anarchism," or even "civil society regnant." In some strange way, it <br>> >turned out that windmill-builders were more important than the U.S. Senate. <br>> >They were certainly better at preparing for the future anyway.<br>> ><br>> >That mammal clinging to the stalk had crawled up from the grassroots where <br>> >the choices were so much more basic and significant than, for instance, the <br>> >one between fundamentalism and consumerism that was on everyone's lips in <br>> >the years of the Younger George Bush. If the twentieth century was the age <br>> >of dinosaurs -- of General Motors and the Soviet Union, of McDonald's, <br>> >globalized entertainment networks, and information superhighways -- the <br>> >twenty-first has increasingly turned out to be the age of the small.<br>> ><br>> >You can see it in the countless local-economy projects -- wind-power <br>> >stations, farmer's markets, local enviro organizations, food co-ops -- that <br>> >were already proliferating, hardly noticed, by the time the Saudi Oil Wars <br>> >swept the whole Middle East, damaging major oil fields, and bringing on the <br>> >Great Gasoline Crisis of 2009. That was the one that didn't just send <br>> >prices skyrocketing, but actually becalmed the globe-roaming container <br>> >ships with their great steel-box-loads of bottled water, sweatshop <br>> >garments, and other gratuitous commodities.<br>> ><br>> >The resulting food crisis of the early years of the second decade of the <br>> >century, which laid big-petroleum-style farming low, suddenly elevated the <br>> >status of peasant immigrants from what was then called "the undeveloped <br>> >world," particularly Mexico and Southeast Asia. They taught the less <br>> >agriculturally skilled, in suddenly greening North American cities, to <br>> >cultivate the victory gardens that mitigated the widespread famines then <br>> >beginning to sweep the planet. (It also turned out that the unwieldy and <br>> >decadent SUVs of the millennium made great ecological sense, but only if <br>> >you parked them facing south, put in sunroofs and used the high-windowed <br>> >structures as seed-starter greenhouses.) The crisis spelled an end to the <br>> >epidemic of American obesity, both by cutting calories and obliging so many <br>> >Americans to actually move around on foot and bike and work with their <br>> >hands.<br>> ><br>> >Bush, the Accidental Empire Slayer<br>> ><br>> >For a brief period, in the early years of that second decade of this <br>> >chaotic century, a whole school of conspiracy theorists gained popularity <br>> >by suggesting that Bush the Younger was actually the puppet of a left-wing <br>> >plot to dismantle the global "hyperpower" of that moment. They pointed to <br>> >the Trotskyite origins of the "neoconservatives," whose mad dreams had so <br>> >clearly sunk the American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of their <br>> >proof. They claimed that Bush's advisors consciously plotted to devastate <br>> >the most powerful military on the planet, near collapse even before it was <br>> >torn apart by the unexpected Officer Defection Movement, which burst into <br>> >existence in 2009, followed by the next year's anti-draft riots in New York <br>> >and elsewhere.<br>> ><br>> >The Bush administration's mismanagement of the U.S. economy, while debt <br>> >piled up, so obviously spelled the end of the era of American prosperity <br>> >and power that some explanation, no matter how absurd, was called for -- <br>> >and for a while embraced. The long view from our own moment makes it <br>> >clearer that Bush was simply one of the last dinosaurs of that imperial <br>> >era, doing a remarkably efficient job of dragging down what was already <br>> >doomed. If you're like most historians of our quarter-century moment, then <br>> >you're less interested in the obvious -- why it all fell -- than in <br>> >discovering the earliest hints of the mammalian alternatives springing up <br>> >so vigorously with so little attention in those years.<br>> ><br>> >Without benefit of conspiracy, what Bush the Younger really prompted <br>> >(however blindly) was the beginning of a decentralization policy in the <br>> >North American states. During the eight years of his tenure, dissident <br>> >locales started to develop what later would become full-fledged independent <br>> >policies on everything from queer rights and the environment to foreign <br>> >relations and the notorious USA-Patriot Act. For example, as early as <br>> >2004-2007, several states, led by California, began setting their own <br>> >automobile emissions standards in an attempt to address the already evident <br>> >effects of climate change so studiously ignored in Washington.<br>> ><br>> >In June of 2005, mayors from cities across the nation unanimously agreed to <br>> >join the Kyoto Protocol limiting climate-changing emissions -- a direct <br>> >rejection of national policy -- at a national meeting in Seattle. <br>> >Librarians across the country publicly refused to comply with the <br>> >USA-Patriot Act, and small towns nationwide condemned the measure in the <br>> >years before many of those towns also condemned what historians now call <br>> >the U.S.-Iraq Quagmire.<br>> ><br>> >It was the bullying of the Bush administration that pushed these small <br>> >entities to fight back, to form local administrations and set local <br>> >regulations -- to leave the Republic behind as they joined the journey to a <br>> >viable future. And when their withdrawal was finished, so was the Republic.<br>> ><br>> >Now, the thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste that <br>> >pro-nuclear-reactor Washington policies had brought into being are buried <br>> >in the granitic bedrock underlying the former capital -- known as the <br>> >Nuclear Arlington in contrast with the Human Arlington to the south, which <br>> >will receive the remains of a few more nostalgic officers from the Gulf <br>> >Wars, then close for good. The whole history of armament, radioactive <br>> >contamination, disarmament, and alternative energy research is on display <br>> >in the museum housed in the former Supreme Court Building, though many <br>> >avoid the area for fear of radiation contamination.<br>> ><br>> >In hindsight, we all see that the left-right divide so harped upon in that <br>> >era was but another dinosaur binary. After all, small government had long <br>> >been (at least theoretically) a conservative mantra as was (at least <br>> >theoretically) left-wing support for the most localized forms of "people <br>> >power" -- and yet neither group ever pictured government or people power <br>> >truly getting small enough to exist as it does today, at its most gigantic <br>> >in bioregional groups about the size of the former states of Oregon or <br>> >Georgia -- but, of course, deeply enmeshed in complex global webs of <br>> >alliances. All this was unimagined in, for instance, the dismal year of <br>> >2006.<br>> ><br>> >By the time the Republican Party itself split in 2012 into two adversarial <br>> >wings dubbed the Fundament party and the Conservatives, the American Empire <br>> >was dismantling itself. Of course, the United States still nominally exists <br>> >-- we'll pay a bow to it this year at the Decolonization Day fireworks on <br>> >July 4 -- but it is a largely symbolic entity, like the British Royal <br>> >Family was for a century before its dissolution in 2020.<br>> ><br>> >A similar death-of-the-dinosaurs moment was at work in the mainstream media <br>> >-- the big newspapers and television networks of that era. During the early <br>> >years of the century, as Bush the Younger dragged the country deeper into <br>> >the mire of unwinnable wars and countless lies, most of the big newspapers <br>> >and television news programs lost their nerve, their edge, or even their <br>> >eyesight, and failed dismally to report the stories that mattered. Some <br>> >fell to scandal -- the New York Times was never the same after the Judith <br>> >Miller crisis of 2005. Some were sabotaged from without, like the Los <br>> >Angeles Times, undercut by its parent corporation's "cost-cutting" <br>> >programs. Some withered away as younger readers fled paper pages for the <br>> >Internet. But behind them, below them, in their shadow, regarded as puny <br>> >and insignificant back then -- even though their scoops kept upstaging and <br>> >prodding the print media -- were bloggers, alternative media such as small <br>> >magazines and websites, the glorious Indymedia movement, progressive radio, <br>> >even the text-messaging that had helped organize the first great Latino <br>> >march of the immigrant rights movement at its beginnings in April 2006.<br>> ><br>> >The Latin American Renaissance<br>> ><br>> >The Latino-ization of the United States had brought some long missing civic <br>> >engagement and pleasure back into public life and tied the country (and <br>> >Canada) to the splendid insurgencies of the southern hemisphere. The era of <br>> >post-communist revolution that would explode from Tierra del Fuego to <br>> >Tijuana in the second decade of the century is usually traced back to the <br>> >entrance of Mexico's indigenous Zapatistas onto the world stage on January <br>> >1, 1994.<br>> ><br>> >One bold reflection of a changing continent in those years was the election <br>> >of progressive leaders -- including leftist Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Hugo <br>> >Chavez in Venezuela, Michele Bachelet in Chile, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva <br>> >in Brazil, and Evo Morales of Bolivia, all by 2006 -- even eventually <br>> >Alicia Ponce de Leon in Columbia in 2014, three years after U.S. war <br>> >funding dried up (along with the America that paid for it). Chavez <br>> >(president 1998-2013) termed this the Bolivarian Revolution.<br>> ><br>> >As a group, they were not bad as national leaders then went, but one great <br>> >blow against nationalism proved to be the British seizure of the former <br>> >Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 for crimes against humanity and <br>> >his in-absentia trial in Spain, a saga that dragged on until the <br>> >blood-drenched dictator's heart failed at the end of 2006. The new world is <br>> >both more transnational and more local than the one it eclipsed, and nobody <br>> >will ever be so beyond the reach of justice again. (Africans, for example, <br>> >recovered from Swiss and offshore bank accounts the hundreds of billions of <br>> >dollars stolen by their former dictators, which gave a huge boost to the <br>> >fight against AIDS and desertification.)<br>> ><br>> >Whatever the names of their leaders, the real force in Latin America -- and <br>> >increasingly elsewhere -- would be in the grassroots activism that the <br>> >Zapatistas heralded, which, in the view from 2026, clearly signaled the <br>> >fading relevancy of nation-states. Latin indigenous movements, labor <br>> >movements, neighborhood groups, worker-takeovers in Argentina's factories <br>> >from 2001 onward, and the Argentinean ideology of horizontalidad (or <br>> >horizontalism) that went with it, were just early signs of this <br>> >development.<br>> ><br>> >Like the regionalist policymaking entities of the United States, these <br>> >movements undermined even progressive presidents to set more radical <br>> >policies and grew to include many indigenous autonomous zones across the <br>> >hemisphere. For example, in late 2006, the 8,000-member Achuar tribe (whose <br>> >region spans what was once the Peru-Ecuador border) took hostage and <br>> >defeated Peru's main oil and gas-extraction corporation in a mode of <br>> >victorious resistance that would become increasingly common. In Mexico, the <br>> >stolen presidential election of 2006 that resulted in the inauguration of <br>> >PAN Party candidate Felix Calderon was the straw that broke the camel's <br>> >back, so to speak. In the years to follow, the Second Mexican Revolution <br>> >spread from Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Mexico City, slowly dissolving that nation <br>> >into a network of populist regional strongholds. Seventeen of them <br>> >reinstated a local indigenous language as their official tongue.<br>> ><br>> >Global Justice and the Drowned Lands<br>> ><br>> >The Latin American Renaissance also created a network of communities strong <br>> >enough to take in some of the climate-change refugees from Central America <br>> >and Southern Mexico, who fled both north and south, along with Sunbelt -- <br>> >and what came to be called Swampbelt -- émigrés from the southern United <br>> >States. The great population transitions thus went more smoothly in the <br>> >western hemisphere than across the Atlantic, where Europeans engaged in <br>> >escalating anti-Muslim confrontations before realizing that only <br>> >immigration could prop up the economies of nations whose native-born, <br>> >white-Christian populations were rapidly aging and, thanks to ultra-low <br>> >birthrates, declining.<br>> ><br>> >The end of those bloody squabbles is generally considered to have been <br>> >marked by the election in 2020 of Chancellor Amira Goldblatt Al-Hamid by <br>> >what was then only a loosely federated association of German-speaking <br>> >bioregional principalities. Similar crises -- and, in some cases, bloody <br>> >cross-community, cross-religion bloodlettings --took place elsewhere, <br>> >especially as populations moved away from increasingly desertifying, ever <br>> >hotter hot zones in Africa and Southern Asia. Some historians have regarded <br>> >the devastating global bird-flu pandemic of 2013 as fortunate in relieving <br>> >climate-change population-shift pressures; others -- including the noted <br>> >historian Martha Moctezuma from the University of San Diego-Tijuana's Davis <br>> >Center on Public Luxury -- discard that perspective as callous.<br>> ><br>> >Every schoolchild now knows the Old Map/New Map system and can recite the <br>> >lands that vanished: half the Netherlands, much of Bangladesh, the Amazon <br>> >Delta, the New Orleans and Shanghai lowlands. And who today can't still <br>> >sing the popular ditties about those famed "fundamentalists without their <br>> >fundamentals" -- the senators who lost the state of Florida as it rapidly <br>> >became a swampy archipelago. Most schoolchildren can also cite the World <br>> >Court decision of 2016 that gave all shares in the major oil companies to <br>> >Pacific Islanders, mainly resettled in New Zealand and Australia, whose <br>> >homes had been lost to rising oceans (a short-lived triumph as the <br>> >fossil-fuel economy ebbed away).<br>> ><br>> >More creative responses to climate change included the tree-traveler and <br>> >polar-bear collectives. These eco-anarchist clans -- now popular <br>> >contemporary heroes -- first nursed plant populations on their unnatural <br>> >journeys north by means of extensive rainy-season nursery cultivation and <br>> >summer planting programs that have since become huge outdoor festivals. <br>> >Today, many city parks and town squares have statues of Cleo Dorothy Chan, <br>> >who organized the first small tree-traveler collective in southern Oregon <br>> >and is now hailed globally as the twenty-first century's Johnny Appleseed. <br>> >("You can't choose between grief and exhilaration; they are the left and <br>> >right foot on which we hike onward," said the t-shirts of the <br>> >tree-travelers.) As for the polar-bear folks, they were initially a group <br>> >of zoologists and circus trainers who, inspired by the tree-travelers, <br>> >mobilized themselves to teach young polar bears to adapt to changed <br>> >habitat. They are often credited with saving that one charismatic species <br>> >in the wild, even as thousands of less emblematic ones vanished.<br>> ><br>> >The Principles of Change<br>> ><br>> >A mature oak tree always looks significant; and, when we look at it, we're <br>> >willing to respect acorns -- but the rest of the time the seeds of the next <br>> >big thing are just trodden upon and overlooked. The ideas that made our era <br>> >and pulled us back from the brink, the stakes that went through the hearts <br>> >of the dinosaurs and the more incremental forces that rendered them extinct <br>> >were all at work in the 1990s. They just didn't look very impressive yet, <br>> >and people were intimidated by the heft of those dinosaurs and swayed by <br>> >their arguments.<br>> ><br>> >The World Court and related human rights, environmental rights, and <br>> >criminal courts became more powerful presences as the sun set on the era of <br>> >nation-state. Multiple changes often combined into scenarios impossible to <br>> >foresee: for example, the belated U.S. recognition in 2011 that the <br>> >International Criminal Court did indeed have war-crimes jurisdiction over <br>> >Americans coincided with the worldwide anti-incarceration movement. This <br>> >explains why, for example, former President Bush the Younger, extradited <br>> >from Paraguay and found guilty in 2013, was never imprisoned, but sentenced <br>> >to spend the rest of his life working in a Fallujah diaper laundry. (People <br>> >who are still bitter about his reign are bitter too that the webcam there <br>> >suggests, even at his advanced age, he still enjoys this work that accords <br>> >so well with his skill-set.) His assets -- along with those of his Vice <br>> >President, and of Halliburton, Bechtel, Exxon, and other war profiteers -- <br>> >were famously awarded to the Vietnamese Buddhist Commission for the Iraqi <br>> >Transition. After almost a decade of the bitterest bloodshed, Iraq, too, <br>> >had broken into five nations, but by this time so many nation-states were <br>> >being reorganized into more coherent units that the Iraqi transition, led <br>> >by the Women's Alliance of Islamic Feminists (nicknamed the <br>> >Islamofeminists), was surprisingly peaceful when it finally came.<br>> ><br>> >"As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just not very <br>> >evenly distributed," said the sci-fi novelist William Gibson in 1999. In <br>> >retrospect, the arrival of the Age of Mammals should have been easy to <br>> >foresee. On every front -- family structure and marriage, transportation, <br>> >energy and food economies, localized power structures -- everyday life was <br>> >being reinvented in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. <br>> >From India to Indiana an interlocking set of new ideas began to emerge and <br>> >coalesce, becoming in the end the new common sense that new generations of <br>> >thinkers and activists were guided by. Who now thinks it's radical to <br>> >advocate that decentralization is better than consolidated power, that <br>> >capitalism's worldview is vicious and dishonest, that the public matters as <br>> >much or more than the private, that enforced homogeneity is not a virtue <br>> >either on a farm or in a society?<br>> ><br>> >The basic tools were already in place long before our era; here and there, <br>> >a few at a time, people picked them up and started building a better <br>> >future. Some new inventions mattered, such as the super-efficient German <br>> >and Japanese solar collectors and methane generators that revolutionized <br>> >energy production, but much of the march toward a more environmentally sane <br>> >future didn't require fancy scientific breakthroughs and technologies, just <br>> >modesty. We scaled back on consumption and production. For example, the <br>> >collapse of the U.S. military put an end to the world's single most <br>> >polluting entity, while the near-end of recreational air travel also made a <br>> >significant contribution to rolling back greenhouse-gas production.<br>> ><br>> >The law of unintended consequences continued to prevail: When touristic air <br>> >travel withered, so did Hawaii's tourist economy -- making the retaking of <br>> >the islands by indigenous Hawaiians via the King Kamehameha Council a piece <br>> >of cake. Of course sailing ships still travel the triangular trade-winds <br>> >route between Latin America, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest.<br>> ><br>> >Everything was changing then, is changing now, and some years back the <br>> >Principles of Change were codified. These simply recited the history of <br>> >popular and nonviolent resistance from slave uprisings (Hochschild '05) and <br>> >Gandhian tactics (Schell '03) to the principles of direct action (D. Solnit <br>> >'09) and social change (see Marina Sitrin on horizontalism, '06) and drew <br>> >the obvious conclusions about how change works, what powers civil society <br>> >has, how war can be sabotaged from below, and why violence ultimately <br>> >fails.<br>> ><br>> >Believers in authoritarian power had prophesied a globalized world of <br>> >corporate nation-states (and indeed the 2012 Olympics featured teams <br>> >identified by branding rather than nation, such as the Dasani and Nokia <br>> >track teams and the Ikea Decathaletes); but even as the polar bears <br>> >survived, a different kind of change in the global climate doomed most of <br>> >the large corporations. The outlawing of corporate personhood was launched <br>> >in Porter Township, Pennsylvania, in December of 2002 and gradually became <br>> >the law of the land.<br>> ><br>> >By 2015, the "human rights" U.S. courts had given to corporations in the <br>> >1880s had been globally stripped away from them again. Of course, there <br>> >were revolts against the new world -- just as the Republican dinosaurs led <br>> >a long rearguard movement against women's rights, queer rights, the rights <br>> >of the environment, and science education, so there were corporations that <br>> >resisted the new order, most spectacularly when Arkansas was taken over <br>> >wholesale by Wal-Mart for seventeen months in the early teens.<br>> ><br>> >The heavily armed Arkansans rose up, Wal-Mart's private army changed sides, <br>> >and what was once the world's biggest corporation joined the dung-heap of <br>> >history along -- most famously -- with Monsanto, derailed by the Schmeiser <br>> >verdict, the precedent-setting World Court decision to award all assets in <br>> >the genetic-engineering corporation to small farmers previously terrorized <br>> >for not paying royalties on crops contaminated by Monsanto's genetically <br>> >altered strains. Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who had <br>> >been appointed ambassador to the United States from the Republic of <br>> >Wal-Mart, was sentenced to three years as a sweeper at an Arkansas farmer's <br>> >market and became locally beloved in the role.<br>> ><br>> >In the American Middle East (known as the Midwest until modern geographers <br>> >pointed out that the west starts at the Continental Divide), sectarian <br>> >feuding, which kept the region in a state of subdued civil war for almost a <br>> >decade, still flares up occasionally. Periodic sorties by the Fundaments <br>> >against new programs and lifestyles are considered part of normal life, <br>> >though Kansas's John Brown Society provides a degree of protection against <br>> >them.<br>> ><br>> >The Republic of Northern Idaho was another outpost of different-sex-only <br>> >marriage laws and creationism, but the need to work with downriver <br>> >communities on salmon restoration and dam removal eventually dissolved the <br>> >breakaway half-state into the Columbia River Drainage federation. Other <br>> >historians claim that the tattooed love freaks of the Seattle region, who <br>> >found common ground with the ex-truckers and elk-hunters of Idaho, <br>> >dissolved the Idahoan Republic via bicycle races and beer fests. Some also <br>> >say the same-sex desires of elk hunters were legendary and led to <br>> >negotiations for a direct rail link to San Francisco and Los Angeles.<br>> ><br>> >In 1996, the Pentagon prepared imaginary scenarios describing five <br>> >potential futures by 2025. Most of them were based on the belief that a <br>> >better world was one dominated by American military power -- which is to <br>> >say, by the threat of state violence. That they came up with five possible <br>> >futures demonstrated, at least, how wide-open the next two decades seemed, <br>> >even to a Tyrannosaurus-Rex bureaucracy that thought it was soon to own the <br>> >planet.<br>> ><br>> >Some of their technological, corporate, and militaristic futures could have <br>> >come to pass. Had people not come to believe strongly enough in their own <br>> >power, in a horizontalist society, and in a planet-wide ability to work <br>> >with the environmental changes the Industrial Age had loosed on us, we <br>> >might be living in a very different, unimaginably catastrophic world -- one <br>> >in which the mammals would never have proliferated. They might even have <br>> >breathed their last without ever emerging from under the fern fronds and <br>> >out of the grasses.<br>> ><br>> >The future, of course, is not something you predict and wait for. It is <br>> >something you invent daily through your actions. As Mas Kodani, a Buddhist <br>> >in Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first century: "One does not stand <br>> >still looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks, a path comes into <br>> >being." We make it up as we go, and we make it up by going, or as the <br>> >Zapatistas more elegantly put it, "Walking we ask questions." What else can <br>> >you do?<br>> ><br>> >Perhaps respect the power of the small and the mystery of the future to <br>> >which we all belong.<br>> ><br>> >Rebecca Solnit lives in and loves the peninsular republic of San Francisco, <br>> >where she is working on a new book. Her most recent books are still Hope in <br>> >the Dark and A Field Guide to Getting Lost.<br>> ><br>> > Copyright 2006 Rebecca Solnit<br>> <br>> _________________________________________________________________<br>> Be the first to hear what's new at MSN - sign up to our free newsletters! <br>> http://www.msn.co.uk/newsletters<br></font></font></span><BR></span></div><br /><hr />Be one of the first to try <a href='http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d' target='_new'>Windows Live Mail.</a></body>
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