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Your Brain on Climate | Podcast
Do we all have a duty to say it like we see it - particularly on things we're not seeing clearly enough, like climate change?
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Are We in a War Against Life? Iain McGilchrist & Rupert Read in Conversation
This conversation is part of an online seminar series taking place in the Spring and Summer of 2023 bringing innovative thinkers into conversation with Iain McGilchrist to explore his philosophy as laid out in The Matter with Things.
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Kairos Club – Wittgenstein, Co-freedom & The Politics of Ecology
In this talk, philosopher, Rupert Read, environmental movement strategist and author of ‘Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy’, argued that Wittgenstein is above all a philosopher of freedom - but that he sees freedom as utterly inextricable from our being together. Freedom is co-freedom, co-liberation.
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Mourn and organise: On the power of truth in a world awash with lies
This article first appeared on ABC Religion and Ethics. Upon learning that he was about to die, the Swedish-American labour activist and songwriter Joe Hill wrote a telegram to Bill Haywood, the founder of the Industrial Workers of the World. It read: “Goodbye, Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!” The (para)phrase “don’t mourn, organise” received a boost in popularity when a collection of Hill’s songs were released under the title “Don’t Mourn — Organize!: Songs of the Labour Songwriter Joe Hill”. The phrase was subsequently used by the Boston Globe as the title of an article honouring the American playwright, philosopher, and socialist thinker Howard Zinn when he…
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How dolphins and whales can teach us to survive
From the day you were born you have been bombarded by person-shaping experiences, from your parents, teachers, friends, media, and society at large. No opinion you hold about any subject can exist without these shapely experiences, and thus the ‘pure’ you, unhindered by others, is practically knowable; you are the exciting cocktail of millions of experiences.
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An unprecedented crisis and lack of sufficient awareness
“The moderate flank stands for mass action on climate, action that will consist largely in “doing” what needs to be done in response to this crisis. We all now know that there IS a crisis, and that Government are not acting adequately on it. It’s time for us to do what is necessary, together, from the ground up, to make our communities resilient, and to make our workplaces and businesses and progressions truly climate-positive.” – Rupert Read. Excerpt from panel discussion with Robin Celikates, Andreas Malm, Eva von Redecker, and Rupert Read on the question “What is to be Done? Climate Crisis and Political Activism”. This was the closing event…
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The rationale for the new moderate flank strategy
Excerpt from panel discussion with Robin Celikates, Andreas Malm, Eva von Redecker, and Rupert Read on the question “What is to be Done? Climate Crisis and Political Activism”. This was the closing event of the Conference “Politics of Nature: Philosophical Perspectives on the Anthropocene” (Oct 20-21, 2022), organized by Thomas Khurana (Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy, https://cpkp.net/) and the ICI Berlin (https://www.ici-berlin.org/).
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EARTH VS. FUTURISM
From the way stock markets and for-profit firms operate to the way the media news-cycle works, chronic short-termism is landing humanity in desperate straits. We’re hurtling off a cliff, and hardly even preparing to make our landing softer. We’re crossing what scientists call planetary boundaries, which we ought to have stayed on the safe side of. The most well-known boundary is: maintaining a safe climate.
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Is “longtermism” the cure or the sickness?
This article was first published by ABC Religion and Ethics here. Central to my work in recent years has been an anguished concern that our species and our political and economic systems are dangerously short-termist. I contend that we need to become long-termist. We need to practice precaution, looking before we leap. We need to plan for the seventh — and, indeed, the seven-hundred-and-seventy-seventh — generation. And so we need to overcome the tendencies of politicians to look no further than the next election (or even the next news cycle), of companies to look no further than the next quarterly report, and increasingly of Stock Market investors to look no…
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Why I’ll be giving poems as presents this Christmas
I’m no Clement Clarke Moore (“Twas the night before Christmas…”) but I’d like to think when my family and friends read my Christmas offerings to them, they will get the same warm, cosy feeling evoked by that much loved poem. It’s a true gift from the heart, not just because I have spent time thinking about that person and what they mean to me but also because I’ve spent time thinking about the planet and what it means to all of us. Whatever else you can say about 2021, it has opened the eyes of many more people that the Earth (and everything on it) is in big trouble –…
