Overview
We belong to each other. The world we are building must help us remember how.
Our economies are built on stolen land, labor, and culture. Everything we build must work to end and help us heal from this exploitation and extraction, restoring balance in our relationships with one another and the earth. Our relationships are out of balance at every level; the clues for how to restore them are mostly found in the intimate and the local levels. Humanity as a whole has forgotten how to cultivate healthy relationships with the earth, yet every human being knows how to love a place, a tree, a familiar animal. The Global North has plundered the Global South, yet relationships of collaboration, mutual benefit, and learning exist in households, in neighborhoods, in companies with just trade practices, and in communities that engage in truth, healing, and reparations. The scale of the healing is vastly out of balance with the scale of the harm—we cannot hope to heal the earth by loving a tree, or to heal the harms of colonization by removing one statue of a colonizer. But we start there and we bring what we learn to our relationships everywhere.
Guiding Questions
How can our solutions stop abuses of land, labor, and culture without unintentionally contributing to other forms of exploitation?
How can we care for each other and heal inside of violent systems while we are working to end them?