It’s been years!

Hey Friends, turns out I’ve only made one post in the last 4 years. Considering coming back…more soon?

In the meantime here’s an interview I did just after Trump’s inauguration. It was published at Medium, as an excerpt from a forthcoming book Radical Democracy: an inventory of transformational ideas, documents, quotes and conversations

xo,

Joshua

Radical Hope: Life During the Climate Apocalypse

Global organizer Joshua Kahn Russell on the shifting terrain of climate justice, the need for spiritual perspective in the movement, and learning to love contradiction in the age of Bernie and Trump.

Part of our series of interviews with transformative activists, organizers, writers and dreamers from the New Left and Freedom Movement of the 1960s through radical social and political movements of today. From the soon to be published Radical Democracy ebook.

Joshua Kahn Russell is a long-time movement facilitator. He’s a core trainer and action coordinator with The Wildfire Project and the Ruckus Society, and currently serves as the Global Trainings Manager at 350.org. He has helped lead winning campaigns against banks, oil companies, logging corporations, and coal barons. Joshua has trained thousands of activists around the world, including Brazil, Turkey, Vietnam, Australia, Canada, Peru, Poland, Thailand, Spain, Denmark, Jamaica, Guatemala, Mexico, and the US. His recent books include A Line In The Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice , Beautiful Trouble with Andrew Boyd, and Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections to Navigate the Climate Crisis, with Hilary Moore.

“Stopping the climate crisis is impossible to strategize, because stopping it is impossible. But navigating the climate crisis to a place of stability and the new way of life it will demand — that’s not only easy for me to imagine, it’s easy to get excited about envisioning it.”

Radical Democracy: Since you started doing environmental work many years ago, the context for your work — the climate itself — has been changing drastically. How has that impacted the scope and strategy of your work?

Joshua Kahn Russell: I’ve spent the last twelve years with my face deep in the science of the apocalypse, including working on an international level at the U.N. with scientists who are talking about the basic survival of our species. It can be overwhelming.

We live in a time of denial about the crisis, but also coming out of a cultural amnesia in regards to social movements and how change can happen. We need to recognize that we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors; there are real lessons to learn from the past. But there is also something fundamentally new about this crisis, which requires real innovation. Both sides of the generational equation — movement veterans who have so much to teach us, and newly radicalized young folks with fresh thinking — are beginning to walk with more humility to reflect together to face this challenge.