As the deep ecology movement begins to recognise the importance of grieving the demise of industrial civilisation, conversations around sacred activism and psycho-spiritual healing are inevitably beginning to surface.
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A few of the really big questions in life are: does everything depend on perspective? How big an effect do our thoughts have in changing the world? Can fear be overcome by transforming thought itself?
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New media has given us a freer press, but more powerful tools for state surveillance and corporate consolidation. The 24/7 connectedness of social networking has enabled us to transcend borders and map global revolutions, but to the point we’re at risk of losing touch with our local communities. Knowledge and validation has become the primary currency in which we trade, equipped with cognitive add-ons to sublimate the reality that we are lonelier, starved for meaning, and more narcissistic than ever. We have become highly innovative and advanced with our techno-visionary ideals of progress, but at what cost to our needs for meaningful relationship, holistic wellbeing and the planet?
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When my mother and grandmother were my age, they knew how to cook, clean, sew and garden, while I grew up on Disney cartoons and microwaved pizza, beheading barbie dolls and pressing complex buttons on a machine. Despite the yuppie conditioning imposed upon gen-Xers and Millennials to equate self-actualisation with technocentric careerism and “having it all”, the pull of re-skilling in the domestic arts has never been more alluring.
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Despite my personal view that careers are an artificial construct of economic conscription, rather than an inspiring signifier of moral prosperity, I’m anxiously adapting to a cutthroat culture of meritocratic musical chairs in a highly convincing game of class conscious monopoly. I wish my words were enough to seal that next paycheck, to keep a roof over my head, to prove I’m worthy and human enough to earn a humble living among the towering chess pieces of industrial civilisation. Instead I find myself playing dead on desks with my Bachelor of Adulthood; stuttering clumsily through interviews and panicking at performance reviews.
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In our individualistic, identity-asserting culture of conditional worth and comparative selfhood, it can feel as though every triumph and tribulation is scrutinised as a defining fault of personal character. As activists and global citizens, we face enough pressure from reigning ideologies and the media telling us how to live and be A Worthwhile Person that it’s sometimes difficult to differentiate when we’re helping the world from when we could be hurting it, and by reflection, ourselves.
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I have an unsponsored Kleenex confession to make: I cried during the Hunger Games. And no, it wasn’t because Katniss put Peeta in the friend zone; a squandered opportunity at cultural critique is far more tragic.
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Unlike many deep green environmentalists however, I’m not so quick to dismiss fashion as completely superficial and irrelevant. Fashion needs to evolve, ideally, to inspire new meanings for aesthetic expression, politicized bodies, and the diversity and enrichment of culture. In a system where commodified self-image is sold as identity, we owe it to ourselves and the planet to truthfully elucidate the stories of those who weave, stitch, embroider, design and shelter the sartorial fabric of history.
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Many sustainability writers and activists believe that we need a mythopoetic vision – a new story to replace the old – in order to heal and transcend the ruins of industrial civilization. This emerging story relies on an idealistic vision of the convergence of universal human values – the expectation that it is our job as activists to change people at their core to adopt peaceful, eco-conscious and ‘awakened’ values.
Read moreDear readers, It is with profound sadness that I write to inform you of the tragic death of one of SHIFT’s beloved writers, Anneke Vo. Anneke died suddenly on Sunday 25th October at the age of 23. I’m in shock, as she was young and healthy, and had her whole life ahead of her. She was one of the best
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SHIFT magazine 