Green Agenda invites contributions to our next issue. Final submissions due 6 March 2023. Submit an expression of interest now.
To speak of change today conjures up images of high-tech gadgetry and low carbon infrastructures pulled together towards energy transitions. Change might be the latest phone, or a new app to address an old problem. Political change may be tweaking regulations, amending legislation, making bad law a bit less bad.
But living towards transformation may mean something else, something both harder to pin down and yet much more vital. Not merely a list of pressing environmental, social, economic goals, but living that vivifies us collectively. Not simply a matter of targets to meet by 2030 or 2050, but more deeply a way of living democracy, a way of learning to be political that is already ecological, of fundamentally unsettling colonial and extractive ways while working on alternatives, of radically opening up flourishing ways of being for our communities in the face of climate crisis.
Capitalism switches gears quickly and easily, from industry to finance, from carbon to permits, yet endless profitability remains central. Constant change to avoid transformation. Against capitalist drift and its denial of our entangled world, we seek to cultivate transformed relations – ways of being with each other that already enact a world otherwise. Yet what we do and how we are living towards transformation is shaped by matters of class and gender, how and where we’re racialised, whether we are able-bodied or not, where we find ourselves amid the global division of labour, and where we think from and with whom.
How do our movements live towards transformation? In the so-called Australian context, but also across much of the postcolonial world, Indigenous struggles, decolonisation and sovereignty have rightfully taken priority as we seek to overcome modernity/coloniality and work collectively for social and ecological justice. What takes place here is plural, complex and inspiring. And it goes by many names and looks different everywhere.
It looks like a blockade, it looks like collective self-organising, like mutual aid, like unions transforming society, like state or government resources decided upon by local communities, which, in turn, gain greater autonomy as they collaborate and see a future beyond “white possessive logics” (to use Quandamooka scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s phrase). It looks like a world after capitalism, beyond colonialism and decidedly working against ecocide. Living towards transformation may be to learn from the networked stories of First Law (as Martuwarra custodian Anne Poelina has written) as we undo the punitive ways through which colonial capitalism defines our present. It looks like caring for Country and each other.
Call for proposals
For this issue of Green Agenda we want to hear from those who are already engaged in the many movements underway towards transformation. We want to hear from those whose politics work up radical possibilities while staying close to the challenges of an entangled eco-social reality. We invite Green Agenda’s readers and contributors—weaving through the environmental and social justice movements, grassroots collectives, universities and TAFE, and party organisation—to share with us what living towards transformation means for you, what it looks like in your everyday – what you’re working on, engaged with, moved by, committed to, hoping for, or seeking to imagine together.
With this call for proposals Green Agenda seeks to strengthen those ready signals for transformed life. Amplifying signals in favour of transformation, as we come to terms with entangled life. We welcome grounded writing that recounts intimately, analytically and creatively the kinds of work that is already in play as we move towards transformative change.
Final submissions due 6 March 2023. Submit an expression of interest.
Carlos Morreo
Editor, Green Agenda
Naarm/Melbourne
Image Credit
Dark Sky Sunset by Mudassir Ali.