In the brutally repressed French protests and general strike of 1968, students ripped up paving stones to use as barricades against police attacks. Finding a layer of leveling sand underneath the stone, they came up with a slogan expressing the urge for freedom in the face of authoritarianism — “Under the cobblestones, the beach”!  In similar fashion, under the concrete of Chicago (and layers of deep time) lies the prairie, the wetland, savanna… a metaphor expressing the possibility of new worlds bursting from the cracks of the old.

Our world today is facing a new apocalypse as we continue to prop up a system that requires infinite growth on a planet of finite resources.  Climate change and biodiversity collapse are already here, and while 67% of the US population believes protecting biodiversity should be a national priority, we aren’t given much of a choice: late-stage capitalism does not allow such priorities, and for most people, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

In this case, it sounds like our ecological failures are actually social failures of collective imagination.  Native gardening and volunteering give us powerful opportunities to push back, but what’s even more important is the community we build and the stories we tell through these activities.  How do we build relationships, with humans and non-humans alike, that can create lasting change in acts of biocultural restoration?  How can we reject the old narratives of self-interest and competition — of human nature as “nasty, brutish and short” — and demonstrate the cooperation and egalitarianism that allowed humans to survive for millions of years before the arrival of agriculture, hoarding, and social stratification?  How to we look to Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous wisdom, aiming for decolonization and responsible degrowth? As a form of personal re-wilding, how can we voluntarily un-domesticate ourselves to be less complacent, to live in closer community with each other, and return to a meaningful relationship with each other and with the web of life?  What lies under the cobblestones?

The truth of the next apocalypse is clear: THE world isn’t ending — A world is ending.  How will we work to midwife the next one?

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