Tag Archive for: Justice

The Soil-Keeping Approach to Regenerative Justice: 7 Principles

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In this critical moment in our shared history, the call for transformational change is growing louder. But what exactly does this involve? Transformational change emerges from deep beneath that which we can see. Our beliefs shape our identities, just as soil health shapes plant life and paradigms shape social systems. Realizing the promise of a just society requires us to remediate inequities embedded in our soils, societies, and selves. However, “systems change” work often stops short of including all of these nested domains, hindering our ability to cultivate conditions conducive to life.

Many people trace the origins of injustice and need for transformational change back to colonization. Looking at the root of this term can help us understand these complexities and devise new healing pathways. The word “colonization” comes from the Latin colere, the noun form of which, colonus, originally signified a tiller of the earth.

Western imagination tends to associate tilling by mechanical plows as the hallmark of industrial progress and evidence of cultural superiority.

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“I Can’t Breathe,” Says Africa

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Ever since I saw the video of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on the 25th May, killed by a police man who knelt on his neck for NINE MINUTES, while he was calling for his dead mother and for mercy, I have been upset and angry, as have been most people across the world and amongst different races.  I ‘ve been watching the riots in the USA and all over the world and wondering whether this will pass by as just another of these events, or whether change really is on the horizon.

We know this systemic racism started four centuries ago and, through endless and varied legal and political processes, was designed to benefit one section of a society. All other systems are subservient to this system and all other people are subservient to a race, a large number of whom are fighting to keep the privelege they feel is rightfully theirs.

I also see the knee on George Floyd’s neck as also being symbolic of how neoliberalism, and the associated neo colonialism, are putting their knee on the neck of Africa. I hear Africa saying, ‘I can’t breathe.’

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