Soil, Spirit, and Solidarity #22
A Weekly(ish) Series
“The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all...Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.” -Wendell Berry
Soil, Spirit, and Solidarity (formerly “Soil Solidarity” ) is a weekly(ish) series that delivers ecologically oriented seeds straight to your inbox. On most Sundays I will share a handful of recommended reads and other resources that I am finding helpful, interesting, or important for tending the “soil” of my heart and faith, helping me become a fully ensoiled human. This weekly haphazard list of reads and resources includes things that I have recently been reading, watching, and listening to as I seek to cultivate a spirituality, and way of life rooted din the work of re/membering the soil. My hope is that this weekly email will provide essential ingredients for the work of composting your own theology, spirituality, and politics, becoming rich fertilizer for cultivating your own healthy relationship with the soil.
Soil, Spirit, and Solidarity #22
Website/Resource: Cooperation Jackson
Cooperation Jackson is an emerging vehicle for sustainable community development, economic democracy, and community ownership.
Cooperative Jackson is doing amazing work and is a great example of a group of people thinking about what it means to build community with principals of solidarity and degrowth in mind.
You can learn more here.
Blog: The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud
By Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.
You can read this blog here.
Book: Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change
by Tad DeLay
From the Publisher:
Capitalism is an ecocidal engine constantly regenerating climate change denial
The age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green- washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timely, interdisciplinary contribution to the environmental humanities draws on the latest climatology, the first shoots of an energy transition, critical theory, Earth’s paleoclimate history, and trends in border violence to answer the most pressing question of our age: Why do we continue to squander the short time we have left?
The symptoms suggest society’s inability to adjust is profound. Near Portland, militias incapable of accepting that the world is warming respond to a wildfire by hunting for imaginary left-wing arsonists. Europe erects nets in the Aegean Sea to capture migrants fleeing drought and war. An airline claims to be carbon neutral thanks to bogus cheap offsets. Drone strikes hit people living along the aridity line. Yes, Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide warming the Earth was already understood before the American Civil War.
Will capitalists ever voluntarily walk away from hundreds of trillions of dollars in fossil fuels unless they are forced to do so? And, if not, who will apply the necessary pressure?
You can pre-order this book here.
Sermon: Place-Based Resurrection
By Dr. James Perkinson / RadicalDiscipleship.net
“Jesus hatches vocation under John’s hand, tutored by a passenger pigeon (the dove Luke will name “Holy Spirit” incarnate), spends 40 days on vision quest, listening to the land, then takes over part of the Baptizer’s crowd after the Big Dipper is decapitated, organizing a liberated zone of villages in the Galilean hill-country, staging spiritual raids into city centers like Capernaum to spit hard truth in the hardened ears of the powers, calling for Jubilee release of debts, Sabbath-circulation of goods, and liberty to the captives.”
You can read this sermon here!