This podcast is the audio track of a presentation given in 2019 for the non-profit organization Science and Nonduality by Bayo Akomolafe, Nigerian philosopher/writer/activist, and executive director of Emergence Network. The full video version is available on YouTube — https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=xIr2hOMVhIc Akomolafe poses some jarring questions:
What if the ways we think about the climate crisis are the crisis? What if the feverish quest for "solutions" (which characterizes climate justice movements today)
is getting in the way of radical transformation? Introducing stories and myths from African tradition, Bayo extends an urgent invitation to notice climate change as the deconstruction of the human, and to approach demise and dying as abundant fields of surprise — a radical discontinuity.
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“When my people say: ‘the times are urgent, let us slow down’ they’re not saying, be slow, like it’s a function of speed; they’re inviting a different kind of awareness. They’re helping us notice the insurgency of the invisible, that is, what we ... pushed aside and made a by-product of our exclusive search for progress. They’re inviting something different altogether ....
I invite you to notice that as well — that we will
not come out of this intact; there is a de-fraction that needs to happen, a dying to self ... I mean all the conditions ... ideas that make us possible, permanent — this is the instability of the world. Maybe it’s time to let that go. We might find ourselves in a different mode of being entirely by adopting de-colonial ways of seeing, sniffing, noticing, of being in the world. We might find other ways of being alive.”