The Importance of Experience in Social Movements

Our worldviews emerge from our psychologies, from embodied states of being. In an effort to describe my framework for understanding social possibility beyond ecological tipping points, I have decided to tell a story. The story is of my life over the course of seven years, of the integration of past traumas, nomadic revolutionary politics, unmitigated grief, unsuccessful attempts at de-escalation, kidney failure, cancer, and the reading of a ceaseless torrent of scientific papers. This story, I hope, conveys the embodied state of being from which my perspective emerges, which I try to describe in contrast to the overly categorical thinking I frequently encounter with respect to our social-ecological crisis. I believe this thinking reflects feelings of helplessness which are mistaken for the products of rational deliberation. My hope in describing my own journey is to convey that my sense of possibility is not simply the result of unwillingness to cope with despair. I attempt to illustrate this by describing key aspects of my worldview, from an emphasis on efforts to increase CO2 flux out of the atmosphere to an earnest belief that some of the recurrent barriers to revolution are not nearly as impossible to overcome as is often imagined.