Fragments and weirding part 1

This’ll be part 1 of a series of rambling, thoughtful, posts I’ll be writing on my perceptions of the social and cultural catastrophe that is global weirding.

First, let me explain that I have adopted the term ‘global weirding’ to express my view of the climate emergency that is now beyond our capacity to fix and of the havoc it is wreaking on our world and world views. I consider it a more galvanizing term than ‘change’ and far more expressive of the events unravelling as we move into uncharted territory as a species.

I think ‘weirding’ captures the essence of the non-linear changes that both our climate and our society are going through. It has been said that it’s almost like our reality is breaking down, fragmenting in fact and I agree, but more on the nature of the new realities in a later piece.

In my musings, I’ve thought a lot about the scale of the problems and the scale of solutions. I’ve come to realise that proffered solutions that are global, unified and broad are not going to work and will contribute to more suffering for the people already suffering the most. Large scale, technical fixes not only take large scale money but feed from the same top down, resource hungry mindse that our troubles spring from.

I’m a tech head myself, so thoughts of geoenginerring, carbon extraction and such used to thrill me. The more I think about it, though, the more I am in favour of what is now called ‘patchworking’. To me, it is the best response to the social, cultural and economic fragmentation that is upon us.

Relying on the government/corporate sector to rescue us with huge projects is the same thinking that gave them the ability to create the huge projects that have got us to the edge of extinction. As long as the driving force behind any effort is economic, we will never progress toward finding a solution that is workable for everybody and will always slide back into our predicament.

Fragmentation and patchworking thinkers say that we should not look at big fixes, rather we should create small, local and personal fixes for small aspects of the problem.

Maybe if action was taken 30 years ago, things may be different, but it wasn’t and were faced with a world that is already fragmenting at an alarming rate.

Anyways, I’m going to turn this post into a bit of a series here on our website, so keep a look out for the progression of my thoughts and the development of my understanding of the issues…