A view from the edge
Toward a more horizontal world
3 minute read
With this final post of the year, I’d like to share a few words on what weaves together the diverse range of stories you read in The Raven, and why I think it’s crucial to meeting the challenges that face us. From struggling against those twin existential crises facing humanity, climate disruption and the threat of nuclear war, to the growing divisions in the U.S. and the need to build political alternatives closer to home. From the civilizational roots of our current crisis to lessons we can learn from native peoples.
It has a theme, and that is place. We live in a world that obscures place, that draws our attention out to the global, to the created realities of mass politics, mass media and mass entertainment. There is no problem with the broader view, and the opportunities we have to explore our world’s many cultures and ways of thinking is one of its graces. The issue is losing our own perspective, and having it subsumed in mass realities that implicitly deny its value. That is why, when looking out at the larger world, it is vital to keep our feet firmly planted in the places we live. This is where we can begin to build the politics and institutions that will enable us to weather the storms that are clearly on the horizon, some already starting to blow in.
The Raven is a kind of hybrid. This weekly journal comes out of a regional and bioregional perspective, from the point of view of living and inhabiting the bioregion known as Cascadia. Yet it covers issues far beyond the boundaries of the bioregion, of the critical challenges facing our world, and the nation in which part of Cascadia is currently situated. Bringing a view from the North Pacific edge of the continent, far from the national and international media centers that shape mass awareness. It has long been my view that the most interesting thoughts and initiatives come from the edges and margins, whether from culturally excluded classes or geographically peripheral regions. When you’re at the center, you’re enmeshed in it, often seduced by its successes and grandeur. When looking from a distance, you can gain the greatest perspective and most complete view.
That is what I attempt to do with The Raven, why I range over such a diversity of topics, seeking to develop whole views that illuminate what the media of the center splits into pieces. Whole perspectives empower. Fragmentation distracts and obscures. So whether you live in Cascadia or another place, as many of my readers do, I hope what I bring you here is relevant to growing your own understanding and taking your own actions to make your place and the world as a whole better. It starts where we live. Whether it’s to work for climate sanity and world peace, or to build institutions that create a greater degree of community, democracy and cooperative endeavor.
In contrast to the increasingly vertical world, where power and wealth is concentrating at the pinnacles, we need a more horizontal world where those are more evenly distributed. That is a fundamental proposition of this journal, a view from the edge encouraging others to develop their own views on a horizontal level, rather than looking up vertically to those who would shape our awareness to their own ends. That’s what I will continue to bring you in this year to come. May we be closer to peace and global sanity by this time next year.
And one more pitch for support. I am heartened by the growth in free subscriptions and readership over the year. I will continue to offer The Raven for free, to make it available to the most people. But I also need your support. So please, if you can, take out a paid subscription using the button below. My year end email box is full of asks for contributions, and there are so many worthy causes and outlets. I know I’m just one more. But if you find my work of value, I hope you’ll consider taking out a subscription. I have another venue that will allow you to make a contribution smaller or greater than the rather inflexible Substack tool. Email me if that will work better for you.
The best to you and yours in 2023
"Whether it’s to work for climate sanity and world peace, or to build institutions that create a greater degree of community, democracy and cooperative endeavor."
Along those lines, I wish you'd write more about the ecovillage movement. A vision of social change could be:
The creation of networks of ecovillage communities (and ecovillage-like neighborhoods in cities) as the basis for the ultimate bioregional reorganization of society.
Steve Welzer
Editor, Green Horizon Magazine
" . . . we need a more horizontal world where those are more evenly distributed".
What we need, Patrick and what we get are vastly divergent. The way it goes.
One can hypothesize all the grass roots movements one likes. They do not count.
This era, this century is a split between the failing West and The Great Eurasian Union.
Expressed further under the Decline of The West, vectored via that failed, longest of the long LongShots, this engineered US-NATO-UK Ukrainian Proxy War over the lives of the poor Ukrainian people to weaken Russia, tip out its government and possess its considerable resources.
Judgment shall be by outcomes. Thus far, it is the EU and NATO that will disintegrate. Paradoxically, the present winners are simultaneously the United States and Russia. Those in the way of superpower aspirations invariably are ground up in the geo-political machinery.
Discussed here in lengthy, abstruse and eclectic prose across several essays that will leave the reader visibly aged, yet possibly far wiser although admittedly that is entirely speculative . . . https://les7eb.substack.com
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