“The world of the powerful is now sensitive to the plausibility of its own destruction in a way that may compare, at least in some ways, with the threat imposed on worlds sentenced to disappearance in the name of the common goods of progress, civilization, development, and liberal inclusion”. – 2019 Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser in A World of Many Worlds.

When Art Keene invited me to write a column for the Indy, he told me that what was needed in these pages was “hope.” He explained that a lot of what is written and published in the Indy are critical assessments of local and municipal efforts, and by extension, a critical orientation towards the violent historical projects that they emerge from. Important work for sure. But critique, by itself, can often lead to closure and despair.

In the face of historic inequalities, ecological disaster, and a renewed reckoning with the pervasiveness and magnitude of white supremacy and colonialism that are so tightly woven into the fabric of our reality, it’s easy to lapse into despair. It can be almost comforting to let go of hope and adopt a sort of cynical pleasure knowing that we are all doomed (is it now 12 years that we have left, according to the latest IPCC reports? 10? Does it matter?)

But hope, too, is tricky. Blind hope, or hoping for a deus ex machina (green technology? God? the Democratic Party?) to save us from the brink, can momentarily stave off despair, but still leave our problems—and the practices that produce them—unacknowledged and unaddressed. It might, in fact, be hope and desire that work to hold us to our dominant ways of knowing, doing, and being that are producing the violent conditions we must contend with…READ MORE HERE