Tradition Vs Change Quotes

Indeed the offset market has created a new class of "green" human rights abuses, wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are harassed or worse...The added irony is that many people being sacrificed for the carbon market are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet.

For instance, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the Conservation Fund have all received money from Shell and BP, while American Electric Power, a traditional dirty-coal utility, has donated to the Conservation Fund and The Nature Conservancy. WWF

According to a 2012 study, modern fracking “events” (as they are called) use an average of five million gallons of water - “ 70 to 300 times the amount of fluid used in traditional fracking.” Once used, much of this water is radioactive and toxic. In 2012, the industry created 280 billion gallons of such wastewater in the U.S. alone - “ enough to flood all of Washington DC beneath a 22ft deep toxic lagoon,” as The Guardian noted. In other words, extreme energy demands that we destroy a whole lot of the essential substance we need to survive - water - just to keep extracting more of the very substances threatening our survival and that we can power our lives without.

Living nonextractively does not mean that extraction does not happen: all living things must take from nature in order to survive. But it does mean the end of the extractivist mindset—of taking without caretaking, of treating land and people as resources to deplete rather than as complex entities with rights to a dignified existence based on renewal and regeneration. Even such traditionally destructive practices as logging can be done responsibly, as can small-scale mining, particularly when the activities are controlled by the people who live where the extraction is taking place and who have a stake in the ongoing health and productivity of the land. But most of all, living nonextractively means relying overwhelmingly on resources that can be continuously regenerated: deriving our food from farming methods that protect soil fertility; our energy from methods that harness the ever-renewing strength of the sun, wind, and waves; our metals from recycled and reused sources.

If this situation is going to change, then the call to Honour the Treaties needs to go a whole lot further than raising money for legal battles. Non-Natives will have to become the treaty and land-sharing partners that our ancestors failed to be, making good on the full panoply of promises they made, from providing health care and education to creating economic opportunities that do not jeopardize the right to engage in traditional ways of life.

And though often forgotten, the more radical wing of the second-wave feminist movement also argued for fundamental challenges to the free market economic order. It wanted women not only to get equal pay for equal work in traditional jobs but to have their work in the home caring for children and the elderly recognized and compensated as a massive unacknowledged market subsidy—essentially a demand for wealth redistribution on a scale greater than the New Deal.

It’s a challenge, too, to those parts of the left that equated socialism with the authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union and its satellites (though there was always a rich tradition, particularly among anarchists, that considered Stalin’s project an abomination of core social justice principles). Because the fact is that those self-described socialist states devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as their capitalist counterparts, and spewed waste just as recklessly.

Indeed the offset market has created a new class of “green” human rights abuses, wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are harassed or worse.

One of the most important – and sudden – changes in politics for several decades has been the move from a world of information scarcity to one of overload. Available information is now far beyond the ability of even the most ordered brain to categorise into any organising principle, sense or hierarchy. We live in an era of fragmentation, with overwhelming information options. The basics of what this is doing to politics is now fairly well-trodden stuff: the splintering of established mainstream news and a surge of misinformation allows people to personalise their sources in ways that play to their pre-existing biases.5 Faced with infinite connection, we find the like-minded people and ideas, and huddle together. Brand new phrases have entered the lexicon to describe all this: filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. It’s no coincidence that ‘post-truth’ was the word of the year in 2016. At times ‘post-truth’ has become a convenient way to explain complicated events with a simple single phrase. In some circles it has become a slightly patronising new orthodoxy to say that stupid proles have been duped by misinformation on the internet into voting for things like Brexit or Trump. In fact, well-educated people are in my experience even more subject to these irrationalities because they usually have an unduly high regard for their own powers of reason and decision-making.* What’s happening to political identity as a result of the internet is far more profound than this vote or that one. It transcends political parties and is more significant than echo chambers or fake news. Digital communication is changing the very nature of how we engage with political ideas and how we understand ourselves as political actors. Just as Netflix and YouTube replaced traditional mass-audience television with an increasingly personalised choice, so total connection and information overload offers up an infinite array of possible political options. The result is a fragmentation of singular, stable identities – like membership of a political party – and its replacement by ever-smaller units of like-minded people. Online, anyone can find any type of community they wish (or invent their own), and with it, thousands of like-minded people with whom they can mobilise. Anyone who is upset can now automatically, sometimes algorithmically, find other people that are similarly upset. Sociologists call this ‘homophily’, political theorists call it ‘identity politics’ and common wisdom says ‘birds of a feather flock together’. I’m calling it re-tribalisation. There is a very natural and well-documented tendency for humans to flock together – but the key thing is that the more possible connections, the greater the opportunities to cluster with ever more refined and precise groups. Recent political tribes include Corbyn-linked Momentum, Black Lives Matter, the alt-right, the EDL, Antifa, radical veganism and #feelthebern. I am not suggesting these groups are morally equivalent, that they don’t have a point or that they are incapable of thoughtful debate – simply that they are tribal.

and becoming a general at age sixteen. Joseph Smith received an answer to his prayer at age fourteen. What happened? How did young people change from being responsible to reckless? The current stereotypical assumption of teenagers was invented in the United States after World War II. In the early 1900s, large cities sprouted up in which youth experienced crime, child labor, and emotional stress. To protect children from these ills, reformers pushed for mandatory schooling, which pooled young people together for the first time. In the early 1940s, the word “teen-ager” was coined, and after the war an explosion of births produced the largest number of youths in history in the baby boomer generation. Economic stability after the war gave American families more disposable income, and to attract more of that money, advertisers began to market things directly to teenagers—cars, music, clothing, magazines, and movies.11 The idea of a “rebellious teenager” was thus invented in the 1950s and 1960s and sold (literally) to the baby boomer generation of youngsters, who grew up and passed this invented “tradition” down to their children, grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren in the twenty-first century. If we assume young men and women will act rebelliously, then when they do, they are simply meeting our expectations! In rebellion against my cultural surroundings and in support of the divine nature and potential of my children, I frequently tell them that “I don’t believe in teenagers!