Dear friends,
Welcome to the latest issue of Green Agenda, ‘Visions & Movements’!
A collection of articles and essays, almost all of which started as presentations at The Green Institute Conference in August last year.
The issue is, of course, only one path through the insights, ideas, and challenges that were discussed at the conference – and there’s more coming, which we’ll be published shortly as part of a special virtual issue on ‘Life at the end of the world as we know it’.
Our latest issue
We open with the work of imagining alternative futures, collectively, to inspire action as we face climate breakdown and the intersecting crises of a world we’re pushing to transform. Ed Morgan and Natalie Osborne’s Visioning futures workshop report focuses us on the importance of nurturing the collective imagination and experimentation.
🔥 Violet Coco’s powerful personal essay draws on her experience of direct action and civil disobedience. In From disruption to destruction, Violet wrestles with the need to escalate tactics, build movements, and the sacrifice and courage demanded, differentially, of us all in this time. And you can also listen to Violet read out the article!
🌏 In their insightful essay Crisis, resistance, and the lure of liberal nation-building, Rajni Gamage and Anna Carlson analyse the 2022 People’s Protests in Sri Lanka. As activist scholars, they examine how the radical political possibilities that emerged during the protests were ultimately foreclosed through the coercive lure of liberal reform narratives. Their reflection is an invitation to resist the deradicalising force of reformism, and to commit to expansive forms of solidarity.
🌿 David Schlosberg’s Sustainable materialism as political action explores how community-based movements focused on transforming everyday practices and flows – from food and energy to fashion – are enacting vital forms of resistance to destructive power and prefiguring more just, ecological ways of meeting our needs.
🐌 In her degrowth-where’s-it-at report, Anitra Nelson takes us to Zagreb, Croatia, for a firsthand account of a recent international degrowth conference and assembly. Anitra reflects on the movement’s evolution as it grapples with questions of strategy in pursuit of a world beyond the shibboleth of growth and its extractive translations.
🚲 In Feet, bikes, busses and trains, not electric cars, Simon Copland clearly argues that our hopes for a liveable future cannot rest on a transition to electric vehicles. He makes the case for another kind of re-envisioning of our cities and lives around public and active transport, as the only truly tenable path forward.
Taken together, the pieces in this issue of Green Agenda offer a testament to the radical imagination and collective experimentations from-below. From visions of alternative urban futures grounded in ecological justice to building material counter-power through everyday practices of growing, making, and sharing, to learning from struggles against state violence and abandonment – the essays show the many ways that our communities are coming together to defend and nurture a living world for all.
Visions & Movements
· Visioning futures by Ed Morgan and Natalie Osborne
· From disruption to destruction by Violet Coco
· Crisis, resistance, and the lure of liberal nation-building by Rajni Gamage and Anna Carlson
· Sustainable materialism as political action by David Schlosberg
· Feet, bikes, busses and trains, not electric cars by Simon Copland
· Talking degrowth in Zagreb by Anitra Nelson
And then there’s Palestine.
Drawing on the analogy between settler colonialism here and there, we’re relearning that the struggle for climate and ecological justice is inextricably bound up with Indigenous sovereignty, decolonisation and liberation.
For close to eight months now, week after week across the continent, many of us have been participating in rallies, direct actions, student encampments and occupations, signed petitions, joined seminars and talks, while learning to see ourselves as part of a larger collective, working up forms of solidarity, and demands for justice.
This coming Saturday 25 May Palestine solidarity groups and Trade Unionists for Palestine have called for community rallies at every port across the country as part of a National Day of Action! See you there! ✊🏽🇵🇸
Support Green Agenda by sharing the essays or by becoming a FROGI!! 🐸
Take care,
Carlos Morreo
Editor, Green Agenda
Naarm/Melbourne
Image credit. 299,25o by Laulcare (2017) CC-BY-2.0-DEED.