Still trying to process the AAR/SBL2019 meeting, I am overwhelmed but happy to attempt to synthesize it into something manageable to which to respond. Here goes!
0. Recommendations
1. Mapping the Territory
2. On the Violent Desire for the Good Life
3. Sacred Immolations
4. Disrupting the Enclosure of the Sacred
5. Counterpublic Theologies and Educations
6. Conclusion
PART ZERO:
EXECUTIVE RECOMMENDATIONS
- Design religious peacemaker programs to promote local resiliency efforts
- Rethink and create up to date complex-resiliency models in changing climate
- Define and describe modes of subsistence living and luxury emissions
- Describe a program of transition towards these subsistence living emissions
- Create a collective designed to ritualize apology through sustained activity
- Organize a groups tasked with a national sacrifice program – considering what can and should be sacrificed to survive in a peaceful, just existence
- Consider best practices for child-raising and provide support in this regard
- Determine what nodes and systems must be disrupted and facilitate their decline and stoppage.
- Incubate and innovate sustainable modes of cultural perpetuation
- Connect, network, and amplify organizational messaging in alternative breakaway economic zones
- Fund alternative media instantiated with place-based, justice-minded peace-focused messaging
- Encourage direct relationships and events that integrate ecological thinking
- Design containers that invite research into restorative and reparative activity
- Establish outlets for spiritual and psychological health work to help publics move through transition peacefully
- Empower subsistence locales to take control of sustainable resources, processes, and systems
- Empower communities to produce knowledge and artifacts geared towards sustainable ends
- Redesign land management practices that integrate traditional indigenous ecological knowledge
- Organize education conferences and seminars geared towards rethinking education content, skills, projects, processes, systems, resources, etc.
- Support new scholars’ research and analysis through training and publication
PART ONE:
MAPPING THE TERRITORY – BATTLEFIELDS, STRATEGIES, TACTICS, AND SACRIFICE IN ECOLOGICAL CONTEXT
Essentially, religion provides an example of peacemaking-in-action, promoting global and regional security through the structural prevention of mass atrocity, violence, and crime. This might take several forms:
- Inoculation programs
- Justice/peacebuilding research
- Interreligious dialogue
The problem is with the shortcomings of our genocide models
- Resiliency models mirror risk factors
- Climate chaos might trigger phase changes, with no ways to absorb these stressors
- International influence is overemphasized to the detriment of domestic agents/actors
- Genocides now may be pressured by much more dynamic systems
In this regard religions need
- Counternarratives to scapegoating
- Humanitarian aid networks to support local actors
- Reconciliation strategies to absorb any triggers and maintain stability
Further research might build on
- how women and children (historically most vulnerable) can be present in peacebuilding
- how to prove genocide aversion didn’t happen because of something else
- niche concerns
- Scale of risk
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15570274.2012.760977
Yet nature is neither just nor peaceful, so to assume environmental ethics as inherently so is to miss the point. A specific peace and justice ethic is needed to incorporate into ecological movements then. This of course is difficult for several reasons…
- Enforcement mechanisms of regulatory agencies are themselves both responsible for justice as well as oppression.
- There is a generational interest in adaptation and mitigation processes
What this means is that the distribution of justice is unequal: climate justice for some means climate injustice for others, requiring us to make choices as to how to discriminate, organize, orient, adapt, and mitigate present emissions against future emissions.
And of course, not all emissions are created equal:
- Present subsistence emissions
- Present luxury emissions
- Future subsistence emissions
- Future luxury emissions.
- The emissions of “combatants” vs. “non-combatants.”
This offers a strategy for balancing critical needs within the context of “slow” structural violence, yet still on the premise that the civilizational continuance of biospheric degradation is not peace. In which case…
What kind of collaboration can we foster?
https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/Stassen_Transforming.pdf
This section concludes with a tactic for reconciliation and restoration – namely, an apology. This has several parts
- A responsible agent
- An admission of responsibility
- An enduring action to right the wrong
In a sense, individual apologies are insignificant. Instead, collectives, being systemic modes of entanglements can ritualize responses. The question arises then, what collectives should apologize? Who should apologize to whom and for what (and how)?
To the first part, perhaps collectives intentionally formed toward this end: past actions shape the present identity of collectives – so which collectives can be formed to carry out such apologies. This goes beyond shaming or guilting. This involves healing the breakdown in trust, where we can participate in systemic entanglements and act in just ways. Typically, this might involve:
- Restitution/reparations
- Lawmaking
- Infrastructure
- Recognition of relationships.
Because ritual collapses past, present, and future, we must ask if the desire for peace is enough to get us to apologize, to cultivate work and learn to lament – to engage in a new relationship with the spacetime of place, and the relationships that characterize it.
This all begs an important and obvious question: if the AAR annual meeting offers critical information, yet to do so requires ecocide, how can this collective adequately apologize for the harm it does, even if one argues these to be “subsistence emissions?”
The death spurred by climate change comes at the nexus of economic and ecological harms:
- Prey depletion
- Habitat loss
- Climate change
- Industrial interference
This includes non-human life, human life on behalf of non-human life, and non-human life on its own. Yet we cannot in good conscience call these “sacrifices,” which itself has multiple components:
- The surrender of a good
- This surrender directed to or for a greater good
Without sacrifice, there is no future. We are then faced with a conundrum:
- Sacrifice the present for the future
- Sacrifice the future for the present
Yet if this sacrifice is imposed on a body (human or nonhuman), it is not a sacrifice, but a victim. It is a material-semiotic of violence and harm against that which is devalued: waste, as opposed to a good.
All of this can help us understand death. If we are to perform an autopsy wherever death occurs, we can determine whether it stems from moral weakness – the willingness to change the world without changing ourselves.
PART TWO:
ON THE VIOLENT DESIRE FOR THE GOOD END
Oil, and fossil fuels at large, symbolize for civilization, the good life. It is an enmeshed desire, rooted in a story, an aspirational narrative that tells of the relationship to the land:
- Imperial ambition
- Agrarian virtue
- Modern civilization
- Progress
This is an entanglement of both history and identity – settler colonialism – forcing the land to yield to the good corporate citizen. Oil and the fossil fuel industry presents the triumph over nature, fueling moral justification of the boundaries it relies on, imposing a plasticity onto the world, where electricity (and the materials it animates) remakes the resources of earth into the desires of industrial capitalism.
In the resultant constellation of flashpoints, where the repugnant cultural other is subjugated, we have a choice to make: whether these past images of the good life will be allowed to colonize human desire and its sense of identity.
What we lack drives a mimetic desire in us, and so we must reconsider the means by which we seek to attain what it is we desire – else the contagion of mimetic escalation grows to pervade our institutions, leading to extremes through reciprocal action. Can we find a “terrible compassion” to understand the violence done at the behest of this desire and act accordingly?
Our education and culture must ask what makes people violent and scapegoat others. The logic of violence shifts blame to the victim, erasing agency, and the power to resist and choose otherwise. This generates several phenomena:
- The aversion to killing
- The aversion to being killed
- The belief in god necessary for belief in nonviolence – providing the courage to be killed
Which is to say, the aversion to being killed may incentivize one to collaborating with killers without the metaphysical premise necessary to justify the courage needed to choose death over killing. That is, our moral “ultimate” goals define the moral system that is the context for meaning.
All of this offers ontological claims and implications.
- Selves sacrifice themselves to drive the future.
- Sacrifice/death is contingent for life/love
- Love draws together the fullness of being
- Being/becoming is always process-relational
But then does such a teleology itself scapegoat the present on behalf of the future, moving to overcome this adaptive mechanism? A movement towards a future perfection seemingly sees the human as incomplete, without full consciousness, necessarily overcoming such original sin through evolutionary deep time.
We are faced with the existential opportunity of agonistic hope, itself a generative praxis and entangled vulnerability that provides for the conceptual space needed to reimagine life. At the same time, it is the fear of complexity that scapegoats and kills.
This authoritarian impulse is latent in the popular psyche, able to mobilize those during periods of extreme fear and change. Must we limit democracy to save it then? Or rather nurture a self-critical and generative beloved interdependent community that lives for justice, defending itself against the core threat of white supremacist domination and colonial-settler extractivism with its vertical violence perpetrated against horizontal society.
Democracy on the other hand can be seen as the emotional attachment to multiplicity rooted in a different cosmology, an expansion of structural incompletion guided by a theology of what is left unfinished. Indeed, this resilient democracy enacts vulnerability, prefiguring an integral praxis that rejects permanence.
This is then our onto-cosmological context:
- Flow is interrupted in crisis events, where something new enters
- Micro-rebellion introduces quantum insurrections of possibility
- This possibility extends into time-space
- Societal creativity emerges through revolutionary waves of and particulants of revolutionary concrescence
Therefore democracy must be recognized as unending, most realized in ongoing struggle on behalf of a fundamental vulnerability, the poetics needed to live out this tension, between forms – the source of agonistic hope. Our active memory of nonharmony, of wrong relations are the constitutive ethical milestones around which to become resilient, imbuing vigilant guardians of expansive democracy, discouraged by partial success perhaps, yet continuing to immanentize and institutionalize forms to focus group intelligence on problem solving through several key modes:
- Disruptors (facilitating breakdown)
- Incubators and innovators (establishing positive avenues)
- Connectors, networkers, and weavers (widening the network)
- Amplifiers (extending the message for recruitment)
PART THREE:
SACRED IMMOLATIONS
Visions of apocalypse have become a lucrative business, mediated in several ways:
- Our real home lays elsewhere
- Bug out survivalism
- Frontier mindsets: move to the next place
- Planned obsolescence
- The Myth of disposability.
There is to an extent, a fetishization of the new, a rugged individualism that welcomes the end of days. Yet to avoid these narratives becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy, we will need to escape these culturally embedded stories, mobilizing resources toward a different end, envisioning alternative instantiations:
- Reinhabitation
- Place-based
- Earth as home
- Sustainability
- Justice/equity
Against white patriarchy, black and indigenous female leadership must seem terrifying, challenging all people to be free, to root themselves into place, and build a livable future out of what has always been present.
Forgetting this is inextricably tied to the loss of identity, producing the cognitive correlate of climate catastrophe – when the exterior environment is unrecoverable, so too may be an interior cognition. That is, the extended mind in integrally part of and reciprocally engaged with the wider world. In which case, we can think of what environments encourage such integration of environment into mind:
- Hybrid assemblages
- Human-nonhuman encounters
- Dense relationalities
- Agency of the wild
- Structured according to cognitive/environmental entanglement
- Ecological memory reinforced
- Perpetuation of patterns reciprocated in feedback
- Where environment is pulled out of trauma and into recovery.
In promoting places with strong memory, natural rhythms, and simultaneous experience of differing modes of time, such natural containers provide opportunities to work through crisis in their different features
- Emergence and resilience
- Prefigurative and formative
- “Active pessimism”
- Generative movement
Direct action camps are not unlike these natural containers, inviting research by sinking into the memory of a given place:
- Ethnography
- Lived struggle
- Limits of assemplages
- Emergent theory (theory on the ground)
- Indigeneity
Camps like these, indeed any socioecological container seemingly will have arisen during a period of dislocation and disorientation, with its subsequent feelings of insecurity and fantasy, not unlike the revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists whose outlooks may accord with two major outlooks:
- Antisemitism
- Revolutionary communism
Such violent tendencies are in a sense traced to their socioecological conditions: apocalyptic violence enters the imagination (through gnostic symbolism?) to make genocide conceivable as the interpretation of violence as necessary for a golden age is normalized.
Thus the fascist, racist hierarchy seeking in the religious race war the extermination of filth is not so unlike the anarcho-communist, egalitarian class war’s extermination of the rich, in terms of the extermination impulse (fanstasy) that is contextualized by deprivation and disorientation that arose during the collapse of feudalism, the rise of urbanization, and the destabilization and collapse of the market.
We should thus consider two questions:
- When is prejudice turned into violence?
- Who is susceptible to the tendency of extermination?
Violence is conducted against others, their worldview situated in a social setting. The result of the process is an apocalyptic shift to new sources of meaning for the newly existentially and spiritually bereft. Other links include:
- A dualistic worldview, targeting an other
- Violence as a pathway, justified by a theory of justice in which the worldview axioms and ethical program are naturalized.
- The apocalyptic function in a specific social setting/situation
- The revolutionary or imperial voice (marginalized or stakeholder)
- Group echo chamber that determines the identity, names the enemy, and dehumanizes the target.
We can see in a sense apocalyptic violence functions to a degree as catharsis for the stress of experiencing the collapse of modernity, a scapegoat mechanism for when the stability and center of gravity collapses into extremist voices, perhaps due to several recent developments:
- Intermodal transportation
- Transnational outsourcing
- Digitalized global war on terror.
The fear of a loss of hierarchy is itself criminogenic, rooted in the paranoid imagination so that the directive to be servile or go to hell becomes a useful tool and missionizing technique.
Indeed it seems like similar themes are projected into our modern crises of climate catastrophe, where such a Mysterium Tremendum seems increasingly deployed in language today, as does the epithet of “terrorist.” On the one hand, there is the fear of the end of civilization, empire, and the deaths of hundreds of millions through pollution, sea level rise, drought, conflict, etc. We can remember Emerson’s words: “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
Like the apocalyptic violence of earlier movements, there is still the theme of evil oppressing good, whether civilization is destroying nature, or ecological activists are destroying civilization.
PART FOUR:
DISRUPTING THE ENCLOSURE OF THE SACRED
It was said that no future can be imagined that is radically different from the present. This should be both a cause of celebration and terror; for most of us, no future exists outside of capitalist arrangements. And for this reason, there is seemingly no future, since capital, itself an embodiment of a particular kind of reason, is antithetical to any future.
Capitalism is the enclosure of the sacred. For indigenous peoples, land management was a sacred duty, yet capitalism emerged as inherently destructive, initiated to better exploit fees once land becomes too scarce to collect knights fees from.
In this sense the trajectory of capital has four components:
- Obsolescence of labor
- Devastation of the planet
- Total alienation
- The autonomous intelligence of capital
Two contrasting strategies that have historically opposed this is emancipatory socialism and productivist socialism. There are similarly reasons why these have historically failed, giving insight into modifying responses:
- Spontaneous self-organization fails because capital self-alienates
- Leadership has been historically state-based and hegemonic, not conscious
- The commons is degraded, not restored
- Sanctuaries challenging alienation and commodification have not promoted the commons
There is an interesting role for art then, infusing into current existence a utopianism that can open and implement possibilities that are aligned to this project. Laudato Si is one example, yet fails for several reasons
- It ignores decolonization
- It ignores ecofeminism
- It ignores anthropocentrism
- It remains embedded in the logic of market systems and therefore cannot successfully interrogate and transform the fossil fuel basis of civilization.
True, LS deems it unethical to let economics dominate, identifying wealth maximization as the greatest difficulty, while offering an integral ecological approach needed to address the socioecological crisis and ensure multigenerational justice.
Yet its refusal to address settler colonialism or propose decolonization strategies is to allow for broken treaties to communicate extractive violence against land and women and assimilation into corporate colonialism as normative, erasing the violations against land and body alike. Its silence on gender and colonization thus reflects its inability to provide a common sanctuary, refuge, or give asylum to those seeking to escape.
An alternative hopeful vision must move through despair and provide agency to transform our situation so we are not governed by capital. It thus must make local adjustments to let some communities survive, addressing the extreme isolation that destroys psychological health.
A realist project would thus address the following:
- Develop subsistence communities
- Salvage communities by empowering locales
- Take control of finance capital, energy, resources, and manufacturing
If there is hope, it must be realized to reside within the recognition that things are so bad we can consider alternative communities, taking back local control as systems breakdown and build a future out of the wreckage to produce something of lasting value and ensure access to beautiful spaces that activate spirit once more.
It is not enough to ecologize racial justice movements, or racialize (?) ecological justice movements. Rather, a deeper critique of the culture that created the crisis of white supremacist racism and colonial settler extractivism needs to be articulated, especially since the black experience is often erased by these myths.
Justice values on the other hand can reformulate ecological activism in several ways:
- Disrupt and challenge the definition of environmentalism
- Providing a persuasive method and message more relevant to urban dwellers
- Move from nature for nature’s sake to one embracing human concern
This reimagining of engagement may disrupt an eco-centrism that is itself rooted in the bifurcation between nature and human, towards communal sustainability that confronts white supremacy (latent or explicit) through an integral ecology.
Thus a racial-ecological critique provides a matrix to map the dynamics and power constraints that produce injustice:
- Racial practices are necessarily environmental
- Settler colonial resource extraction (white supremacist capitalism) degrades the earth through its directive for resource accumulation
- Flesh-making via fungible units of nature-value
- Securitization and enforcement of borders on behalf of private companies
- Climate prompts conditions for legal enforcement and law breaking
In all these cases, a dehumanizing culture is endemic to the institutions operating within this matrix. Thus the white world-making requires violence against native, black, and female epistemologies, territorializing, racializing, and extracting flesh for the sake of profit.
Like black and brown bodies, earth is demarcated as a sacrifice zone, with structural supports enacted to protect against policies that might reform such processes. This reality can be exposed through alternative narratives and scholarship that engages the fundamental contradictions:
- People are sacrificed for the “greater good”
- Social relations are organized around sacrifice zones based on resource extraction
- Extraction relies on the political theology of sacrifice
- A culture based on extraction does not have the spiritual resources for conversion
This last point is important for several reasons:
- Sin is defined as defilement
- The idea that resistance is futile, that we can’t fight nature, is normalized
- Sacrifice becomes surrogacy, salvation attained through scapegoating
- Nature becomes surrogacy, extracting value while storing harm.
These then are the false sacrifices of the earthly city, rituals valorizing death; while a truer sacrifice would do differently:
- Change self, acting towards god/creation
- Form justice through love, signifying divinity
- Inaugurate regime change, opening communities to healing.
That is, if extractivism exists as a sacrificial logic, alternative economic systems must be formed from within, with local knowledges generating the power to:
- fight for all forms of life through disciplined and sustained effort,
- resist racialized practices of exploitation that remain necessarily environmental.
Solidarity begins in anamnesis, a truthful engagement of history to recover the stories of those silenced, dehumanized, and exploited. Coloniality looks at nature as energy to be worked, exploited metaphysically to provide productive profit, cheapening life by normalizing extractivism, objectivizing subjects-made-things through a dualistic separation that narrows the focus of environmentalism.
This is to say that the binary consciousness is embodied by and foundational to white supremacy of colonial logic. To challenge this white male extractive coloniality then, and the violence it justifies (even through environmentalism) a decoloniality must build new “houses” of thought to disrupt economic structures through anti-consumer choices. The legal privilege and agency of corporations whose now supra-human consciousness can be understood as an extension of the plantation, the Anthropocene better recognized as the Plantationcene – raising two critical questions:
How far back does it go?
Who can answer this question?
PART FIVE:
COUNTERPUBLIC THEOLOGIES AND EDUCATIONS
The movement from environmental theology to a theology of ecojustice requires a counterpublic theology directed to several goals:
- responding to crisis
- forming new publics
- amplifying counterpublics
Thus a sub-alternative counter public can provide oppositional interpretations of communal needs, whose ecotheologically minded justice campaigns emerges creatively from communities in struggle.
Flashpoints then might offer archetypes of dispossession and resistance, moments of settlerism and indigenous conflict where a political ecology of tyranny with religious connotations are interpreted that willingly identify “evil” in the other. For instance:
- where the constitution as a settler colonial document is worshipped as a sacred text
- where land ownership is revered as a sacred duty
- where racial formation is determined to be essential to one’s identity
- where progressively remaking wilderness into productive land for the market is determined to be the natural relationship between society, economy, and environment
Both ecologists and settlers reinforce racial and colonial dynamics by
- Naturalizing asymmetrical power relationships (god> government > settler > native)
- Adhering to a civic religion of land management
- Signifying political, religious, racial, and economic aspects in any given place
There are problems with this of course:
- Whether using colonial mechanisms reinforces settlerism, even on behalf of ecological principles or native rights
- Whether the possibility to move to a direct relationship with the land through subsistence lifestyles have been completely eclipsed as land ownership by colonial settlers is now near total.
One can look to a decolonial bioregional land-based network that engages with indigenous and marginalized groups as models for reparations, or similar watershed discipleship networks or organizations (Agape Community) that incarnate ecological commitment.
These communities are critical, as is the role of the educator in the midst of wicked problems within anthropogenic climate change in imagining and transforming relations. Thus ecotheology can recontextualize activities by focusing on:
- Action
- Reflection
- Analysis
- Rereading
- Committed action
Here, affective force and orthopraxy helps to move language, images, and symbols, to the level of the senses and cognition, for the sake of restorative relationality.
If it is true that elections do not (yet?) produce icons of public will, perhaps it will be the case that local communities do.
By integrating these historical and cultural contexts into our teaching, epistemological considerations and contemplations will have address certain core aspects of these modes:
- Discourse
- Practice
- Community
- Institutions
This in turn requires us to maintain such spaces as
- Internally diverse
- Changing over time
- Embedded in sociocultural, and political economic contexts
- All the time environmental
It is institutions that define their very authority they use to maintain their authority. If it is these institutions that are rooted in exploitation, then their authority needs to be intervened within and disrupted.
Religious scholars can help in this way by:
- Assessing dynamics
- Engaging communities
- Counter violent extremism with authentic leadership
- Radical inclusion
This of course brings up the question of the ethics in weaponizing faith. Religion is both a source of division and healing, but it should be remembered that there are, in the absence of authentic scholarship, those who do harm with advice. “Personnel is policy,” in a sense, by mapping the religious territory and serving faithfully and legally, assessing and sharing dynamics in fieldwork, presenting certain critical insights into:
- Problems in categories
- Actionable critiques of policy frameworks
- Ways of conceiving
- Basic facts
- Key contacts
- Substantive issues
In this way, empirical research can be broken down into executive summaries with bullet point takeaways. Further considerations include:
- What political pressure leaders respond to
- Economic ties
- What foundational ignorance can be corrected
- What nuance must be understood
- How to facilitate humble, respectful, honest conversation
- How to best inform policy
This in turn can help counterpublic theologians and religious scholars better orient their research programs towards the public good.
What then does religion offer to this project? Some suggestions:
- The ability to confront, ensure, and create commitment to alternatives
- Plant alternative infrastructure,
- Hone subsistence skills
- Relativize ecological thinking
- Rethink categories
- Thematize education
- Crowdsource activities
- Focus on justice/peace studies
- Decolonize religious studies
- Trauma and disaster/interfaith disaster response units
From these suggestions, capstone course/projects can be built to:
- Address programmatic outcomes
- Demonstrate theory/praxis
- Articulate real world ability
- Film, perform, exhibit skills and content
- Create digital artifacts
- Write theses and dissertations
- Produce new biographies/histories
- Organize community based project
- Initiate oral history projects
In doing so teachers and students can consider:
- What thoughts exist already
- What new thoughts are emerging or have yet to emerge
- How to integrate this into a political theology of nature project
- How to work in opinion pieces
In turn, some assignments or elements for teachers to focus and integrate climate justice into:
- Syllabi
- Readings and study questions
- Reading quiz
- Reading questions
- Experiential assignments
- Self-grading
- Pop-up classes
- Annotated bibliography
- Contributions to professional portfolio
- Pick soul traits of an ethical person
- Planting food forests
- Look for webpages of work history
- Include images and works cited
- Strong summative pieces
- Word counts > Page count
- Key terms and ideas
- Critical thinking, information and visual literarcy
- Peer review preparation
- Pilgrimages
- Personal accounts and connections with class and readings
- Reading reflections on experiences
- Create your own ______
- Historical papers as scaffolding for your own _______
- Space time locations, sacred texts/garments
- Why is this sacred?
- Museum visits
- Genocide survivors
- Read, bring materials to class for lobbying, role play, do it
- Empirical study (proposal, questionnaire, data, rough, peer review, publish)
Research Project Scaffolding
- Topic or thesis
- Outline or project plant
- Lit review/annotated works section (critical thinking, citations, info lit)
- Draft with peer review (multimedia/story boarding)
- Integrate comments, submit final presentation with works cited
- Publish and comment on others with rubric
Research Project Responses
- Reconstruct, evaluate, accept or reject argument
- Ask critical questions
- Affirm your agreement
- Ask exploratory questions
Opportunities
- USAID
- CDC
- Congressional Districts
- Civil and Foreign Servants
- Abassador for Religious Freedom
- Office of Global Affairs
- City/regional levels
- Mayors/city council
- Local government doing entrywork with religious leaders
- Think tanks
- Opportunities
- Congressional offices
- Op-eds
- Media spots
- Think tanks (CFC, Heritage, Brookings…)
- Private sector
PART SIX:
CONCLUSION
This is where I try the impossible, to wrap it all up in a succinct little section.
I have focused here on the role of peacemakers in a time of crisis, to prevent atrocities through offering counternarratives that reshape relationships, strategies, and networks towards ecologically just ends.
Along with the external structures, this also requires attention to personal and collective desire, around which these structures constellate. By rethinking the onto-cosmological context and its ethical and political and economic implications, alternative instantiations, catalyzed in particular socioecological situations, can provide containers that promote active theory and praxis to provide alternative, nonviolent pathways to structural change.
Capital, with its colonial settlerism, contingent upon extractivist paradigms, has colonized our worldview in many respects. Decolonizing these worldviews through justice minded, ecologically oriented engagements can expose fundamental contradictions in mainstream narratives provide the elements needed for solidarity, symbiosis, and the spiritual resources needed to adequately respond to the violent exploitation and mismanagement of socioecological relations.
Decolonial bioregional networks engaged in reparations are able to incarnate ecological commitment, recontextualizing action through affective force and orthopraxy, integrating these elements into epistemological, ontological, ethical, political, and metaphysical discourse and modes of social praxis.
Religious scholars and eco-theologians are well suited to this task, communicating empirical research to policy makers and communities in struggle alike.