Unleashing Shakti: our power to transform

A renewable-energy economy will only be built through the renewable energy of free and self-organised citizens and communities.

The transition beyond oil is not merely a technological transition - it is above all a political transition in which we stop being passive and become active agents of transformation by recognising that we have the capacity, the energy, and the creativity to make the change.

Life is based on the self-organising energies of the universe, from cells to Gaia, from communities to countries. We as living systems are networks of chemical and energetic flow and transformation.

Thus life is energy - not fossil fuel energy, but living energy.

Rather than bounty, mechanistic science, industrial technology, and the market economy have created scarcity - scarcity of food and water, scarcity of work and energy, scarcity of happiness.

They have worked in concert to increase human dependence on energy from fossil fuels and, in the process, have destroyed life on earth and meaningful, creative work for all. A false paradigm of growth that allows the rich to get richer has sucked out the resources from the planet and the joy of living from humanity.

Reductionist, mechanistic science creates scarcity by blinding itself to the connections that support and maintain the cycle of life, the energy flows that are based on self-organisation. Industrial technology creates scarcity by using ever more resources and energy while externalising the social and ecological costs of its appetite.

By substituting fossil fuels for people (without providing access to sustenance), industrial technology also creates a scarcity of work and well-being.

The market economy creates scarcity by promoting a consumerist culture based on over extraction and over consumption of energy, robbing the poor, other life-forms, and future generations of their share of resources and energy. The vision of those who promote this paradigm is based on the illusion of endless growth.

They don’t acknowledge that endless growth requires endless extraction of resources and endless generation of waste.

The multiple crises of climate insecurity, energy insecurity, and food insecurity create an imperative and an opportunity to transcend the limits of the mechanistic-industrial-capitalist paradigm that has been systematically shrinking our potential even as it peddles progress.

The paths out from this crisis are not being blazed in the boardrooms of the global corporations who dominate our world today and are largely responsible for crimes against nature and humanity.

Industrialisation of food and agriculture has put the human species on a slippery slope of self-destruction and self-annihilation. The movement for biodiverse, ecological, and local food systems simultaneously addresses the crises of climate, energy, and food. Above all, it brings people back into agriculture and reclaims food as nourishment and the most basic source of energy. New ways of thinking and acting, of being and doing, are evolving from the creative alternatives being employed in small communities, on farms, and in cities.

It is this renewable energy of ecology and sharing, of solidarity and compassion, that we need to generate and multiply to counter the destructive energy of greed that is creating scarcity at every level - scarcity of work, scarcity of happiness, scarcity of security, scarcity of freedom, and even scarcity of the future.

Climate chaos, brutal economic inequality, and social disintegration are jointly pushing human communities to the brink. We can either let the processes of destruction, disintegration, and extermination continue unchallenged or we can unleash our creative energies to make systemic change and reclaim our future as a species, as part of the earth family. We can either keep sleepwalking to extinction or wake up to the potential of the planet and ourselves.