Our contribution:
We live within the legacies of our designs, the stories that we chose to tell, and the relationships that we decide to cultivate.
The pandemic suspended our daily lives. It grounded us.
With hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and contagious disease hovering and threatening the existence of our social fabrics, habits, and material infrastructure.
We remain in quarantine.
In this moment of suspension, we can reflect on our frantic travels and constant commute, the rush to catch up and chaise phantom growth ideas often empowered by extractive greed and unsustainable economic logic.
From the quarantine, we can also view streams of footages of the outdoors captured by surveillance cameras and remote satellites. We can observe rapid changes taking place.
Our global lockdown made space for other forms of lives to emerge. Boars and deer and other wild animals roam freely in areas we, humans, no longer attend. We witness that with our absence, large ecological systems begin restoring themselves—a reminder of what actually matters. Wealth and plentitude are found in the clearing of skies and oceans, the improvement of air and water quality.
Don’t let a good crisis go to waste – following what Naomi Klein calls ‘The Shock Doctrine,’ as the pandemic exacerbates extractive corporate agendas and national isolationism; we need to ask how it can be used as a catalyst for another kind of change.
It is a time to challenge ourselves to “write stories and live lives for flourishing and abundance, cultivating the capacity to reimagine wealth, learn practice healing rather than wholeness through what seems now improbable collaborations and propose near futures, possible futures and implausible but real nows “(Staying with the trouble. Donna Haraway).
It is time to change course, reassess our values, and seek redemption through actions of care and love.
