With the coming of fall, a few notes to my readers

In a doomscrolling, clickbait world, the importance of clarity

3-minute read

With the start of September, the beginning of meteorological fall, I’d like to share a few thoughts with my readers about where I’ve been and where The Raven is going.

I’ve been coming to you a bit slower over the summer. Between a death in the family and personal health issues, it’s been a tough year so far. So I’ve been taking time to do some needed personal healing as well as some important personal writing. Of course, on top of all the personal stuff is the onslaught of distressing news. The never ending barrage of Trump power plays and shredding of vital functions of government. The ongoing slaughter in Gaza and attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, with seemingly no way to stop the brutal Israeli regime. And, for someone who has worked on climate for decades, the many reversals of progress even as climate disruption accelerates.

I’ve been taking some time to absorb all this, and to consider how I in my small way might contribute to turning all this around. I believe my best contribution is to bring clarity. These days, the air is filled with proclamations of doom, fed by the news cited above. Our algorithm-driven, clickbait world promotes this kind of approach. It grabs attention. My ethic, grounded in striving to be an honest journalist, is to tell the story as accurately as I can. There is a fine line between overstating a situation and underplaying it. I am concerned the former, instead of motivating action, crushes people’s hope and spirits. At the same time, it is undeniable we are in situations that are in many ways unprecedented and incredibly serious. We need to be very clear about where we stand and what we can do about it, neither exaggerating nor downplaying it.

My commitment to you, my readers, is to try to be as clear as possible, and illuminate how what we face has been building a long time. Trump is a symptom of a crisis with far deeper roots that will go on even after Trump is gone. We must dig down into those roots, pull them out, and plant the seeds of a new world. We need to go beyond superficial answers to work on deep, systemic solutions. A consistent theme of what I do here at The Raven is to try to point the way to those solutions, and how they begin at home, in the communities and bioregions where we live.

So as fall opens, I hope to be coming to you on a more regular basis. Over coming months, I will continue with the Possible Worlds project I began a few months ago, reviewing work by some of the most insightful visionaries on the world we can make. A stunning level of great thinking is out there, and it hardly gets enough play in our doomscrolling world. We need a sense of possibility and how we can realize it. I’ll be doing my best to bring it to you.

I’m also developing a piece on our specific situation in the U.S., seeking to put it in context, and sharing my best thoughts on what I see coming over the next 5-10 years. Honestly, I think we’re only at the early stages of an upheaval that will uproot a lot of comfortable assumptions. How can we weather these storms and plant those seeds of a better country and world? I’ll try to answer those questions.

If there is daylight in this dark situation, it is that there is spreading awareness of the seriousness of our situation, of how what has been cannot continue and profound change is needed. We are not going back to the way it was. Awareness is the keystone on which we can build those changes. In whatever way I can, I will work here at The Raven to help spread that awareness and point to the changes I believe are necessary.

As always, I especially appreciate those of you who financially support my work, either with paid subscriptions or one-time contributions through the coffee buying button. It means a lot to me, and helps keep body and soul together. And lets me keep my writings free so they can achieve their widest spread. Please share freely.