Tip one: Combine the change of structures or system with personal change. These changes are often at odds by stating that one of them is the first; the other, depending on the vision you have, can only come as a consequence of the other. However, both planes should be seen in metabolic relationship. A change of structures promoted without support for new principles of personal behavior will seem rhetorical, will not lead to examples, dissociate the doing with the saying. At the same time, a gradual or more intense change of structures will create new conditions of possibility for personal change. The extension of borders in one of these planes creates conditions for the expansion of the borders of the other.
Tip two: combine local, national, and global actions. Large-scale general changes are not the sheer sum of local actions and changes. But such large-scale actions aimed at global change would lack support, strength, but express what is also happening in multiple points or local territories. At the same time, local initiatives and changes will have greater depths and facilities if there are global and national scenarios that create better environments and conditions for transformative processes at that scale.
Tip three: combine the need for urgent action with increasingly democratic and massive processes. There must be skill and skill to base a human time challenged in assuming the threatening speed of ongoing geological changes, the product result of the impact of capitalist and productivist humanity and which, at the same time, is not presented or is experienced as an “order ” eco-friendly tax. Historical-social time must be in correspondence with environmental urgency, reversing the classic way in which we have represented ourselves both times. No ecological dictatorship, no collective suicide. This requires combining exemplary actions that give visibility to the magnitude of catastrophes and the potential to act with democratic processes that build new collective moral convictions.
Tip four: combine initiatives, processes, experiences, building power “in” and “from” civil society with advances, processes, building institutionality in the spheres of States. The first must dispute the cultural and practical orientations of society, densifying society from socio-environmental initiatives, but also to constitute backgrounds and circumstances for the character of the State and representative policy to be facilitating these processes. Conversely, institutional, state changes must be based on processes, expressions, and social organizations while being a factor in their empowerment.
Suggestion five: combine the defense of nature, its balances, the spiritual and aesthetic connection with it, with a renewed valorization of the human. The human must find an aglador and a reference, ethical, in the re-knowledge of nature as something irreducible to mere productive factor or raw material. At the same time, recognizing oneself as humans in this new (and old) sensibility and relationship with nature is a sustenance and a result of new relationships between humans.
Tip six: combine the forces coming from reason and emotion. The idea that “reason” has been the basis of modernity that has rightly raved nature leads to its disqualification and to elevate the world of the sensitive, of emotion, of the spiritual, as the foundations of a transformative force. The latter is key; but it is also key to distinguish that this critically criticized “reason” has been an instrumental type in the service of ends and horizons, such as the mastery of nature, and that they ended up transforming it, into ends in itself. In the face of this, a substantive reason must be replenished, not reductible to the mere mechanics of medium-purpose efficiency, which is open to expressions of emotion, celebration, the mystical, not as “inferior” realities imposed by the mere empire of reason Productive. But a new aesthetic, spiritual, playful experience with nature also needs to be based on a new ethic, a new reason that is able to understand and subjectivize the meaning of it.
Tip seven: combine ideological, cultural and worldview aspects that have differences can constitute a broad and diverse current and force in the direction of a planetary defense and social transformation: among those who depart from a fundamental critique of modernity, those who criticize the current order of things from the values of modernity itself but denied or not concrete in their capitalist expression, or who position themselves from postmodern values. Among those who do so from an anthropocene’s overcoming or those who argue that we have lived, rather an era of the capitolocene. Among those who raise the need for ecocentrism or those who are located from radical ecological anthropocentism.
Tip eight: combine the idea that for there to be real change and a historical inflection there must be a majority with recognizing that those who are today for this profound and active change constitute even a minority. Beyond those who have direct interests in the current system, behind it there are sometimes information deficits, but above all difficulties in imagining and building images of future situations and trajectories. This involves various actions that make the catastrophes already started, acts of consciousness that push ways of different to inhabit. Also, advance from a pedagogy of catastrophes, which knows how to show environmental injustices in their origins and consequences and write different historical paths from the practices that imagine and narrate other possible endings.
Suggestion nine: combine criticism of what happens and continues to happen with those victories that are obtained in different spaces, in society and in public policies; in culture, in common sense, in the change of eyes, in the strength of manifestations, in the change of the limits of the unacceptable and the possible, in the use of resources. Only show the powers that set limits and frame the present; only structures that resist change or show all achievement, by part, co-opted by the dominant powers and structures, end up invisibly making those forces, achievements, victories, constructions, experiences unseen.
The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
