Even though George Monbiot doesn’t mention Community Rights in this recently published and powerful 15 minute video, I see a connection. He makes the point that facts and information are important, but what is more important and powerful are stories. Muriel Rukeyser once said, “The Universe is made of stories, not atoms. Throughout history one collective narrative after another has worn thin, then to be replaced by another. We’re humans; that’s what we do.
As we move forward into our political future and deeper into our environmental predicament one story encoded in law that will have to change is a local government’s relationship with the state and federal levels of government in the United States. The dominant legal story we currently find ourselves in is the Federal trumps the State, the State trumps the Local. It’s management from the top down. The story we, in the Community Rights movement, are looking to be in is “We The People in our communities know what’s best for us. We have the right to enact and enforce laws that protect our health, safety, and welfare. That’s what governments are instituted for, and they’re illegitimate if they fail to do so.”
The more of us who look to be in this story, the closer it gets us to the democracy the anti-federalists envisioned at the founding of the country and the more it loosens the grip of the psychopaths who are currently in control. After all, isn’t it much easier for a psychopath to control at a distance than it is for them in a local community where they come face to face with the wrath of their own community members? Government works best when it’s closest to the people.
Learn more about the Community Rights story and what you can do to be in it by looking around our Community Rights US website. Below is a description of George Monbiot and this Ted Talk. — Curt Hubatch, Community Rights US Media Team member
Video description: To get out of the mess we’re in, we need a new story that explains the present and guides the future, says author George Monbiot. Drawing on findings from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, he offers a new vision for society built around our fundamental capacity for altruism and cooperation. This contagiously optimistic talk will make you rethink the possibilities for our shared future.
About George Monbiot: As a young man, George Monbiot spent six years working as an investigative journalist in West Papua, Brazil and East Africa, during which time he was shot at, shipwrecked, beaten up, stung into a poisoned coma by hornets, became lost for days in a rainforest (where he ate rats and insects to avert starvation) and (incorrectly) pronounced clinically dead in a hospital in northern Kenya. Today, he leads a less adventurous life as an author, columnist for the Guardian and environmental campaigner.
Among his books and projects are Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life; The Age of Consent; and Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. His latest book is Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. He has made a number of viral videos. One of them, “How Wolves Change Rivers,” based on an extract from his last TED Talk, has been watched 40 million times on YouTube.