A new direction for The Raven

Building the future in place

The Raven has been a bit quiet in recent weeks as I’ve been contemplating the latest climate news in this year of unprecedented extremes. Hottest days in recorded history. Ocean temperatures at unprecedented highs. Polar ice hitting new lows. Every day seeing deluges turning streets into flooded rivers and record-scale wildfires ravaging landscapes. Cities and whole regions choked by wildfire smoke.

As someone who has been writing about the increasing disruption of Earth’s climate since the late 1980s, and who has spent many years engaged in activism to turn the situation around, these developments pose the deepest kind of challenge. Kind of a gut punch, to tell the truth. Has anything we have done made a significant difference? Certainly we have not turned a tide that is still strongly running against us. What can we do now?

So I have been doing a lot of thinking and intense note-taking to consider the course of this web journal, what contribution I can make here, what new pathways I can suggest. I have concluded I will be making a major change in direction that reflects and focuses more tightly the emphasis on building power in place that has been a theme since I began The Raven two years ago, plotting practical directions that I think provide some of the best avenues for change available to us.

In coming weeks, I will conclude my series on historian William Appleman Williams Empire as a Way of Life, pointing to how the drive to empire and expansion has led to the great disruption our world faces, of which climate is only one aspect. And then I will begin to lay out we can move “Beyond Empire,” which has been the short description for the theme of this journal, to “Building the Future in Place,” its new theme. I plan to dig into the details and practical strategies in ways I have not done before.

So I hope you will continue with me on this journey, which is indeed one of exploration. And, if you are not yet a paid subscriber, I hope you will become one. I do need your support to continue this work, which I believe will make a unique contribution to navigating this great disruption and leaving a habitable world for our children and the other species with which we share this planet. And thank you, my current supporters. You help make it all possible.