The Two Stories

"I really do believe that the increasingly intense disasters that we're facing: wars, terrorists, blowback, climate change...flow from this very dangerous story in which humanity is trapped. It's that same old story that tells us we can make a terrible mistake, and when we can no longer stand the sight of it, when we can no longer bear to live inside it, we can escape. We can escape to someone else's land, to a gated city in the sky, a "celestial green zone". This is the story we've been repeating now for thousands of years. It's why capitalism, imperialism, and the major religions have had such a fruitful partnership. Some are choosing to fight this with different narratives that essentially say the same thing. Stories that promise salvation and utopia, but only after much more death and destruction.

"It's in indigenous communities that we find narratives that flow from an entirely different premise: The earth is finite. Life is a cycle. There is no escape hatch. No boat is coming. We will not be elevated to the sky."

-Naomi Klein, wrapping up her 2007 Shock Doctrine tour in Chiapas.