#276: James Bradley on our collective futures

 

A powerful piece by James Bradley.

The storm that is upon us will leave nobody untouched. Surviving it demands we build a world that treats everybody — human and non-human — as worthy of life and possibility.

"The anthropologist and philosopher Deborah Bird Rose, who died in 2018, wrote of the impossibility of bridging the gap between our limited ability to affect what is taking place around ourselves and the cost of facing it.

Yet she also recognised that to turn our backs to it was also to turn our backs on ourselves. “To face others is to become a witness, and to experience our incapacity in this position.” It is also an ethical imperative, a way to “remain true to the lives within which ours are entangled, whether or not we can effect great change”."