Participatory Practice
us with a role to play in creating a happy society on a healthy planet. In order to deal with this responsibility, the first step is to understand how the current human and environmental crises have been allowed to develop, escalating in such a short space of time, unconstrained.
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We are living through an epoch in world history We are at a pivotal point in the history of the world. A world in crisis brings an opportunity for change. This bigger picture shapes our place in the ecosystem and shines a light on the reality of local lives at the sharp end, a world in which people have been dehumanised, swept to the brink of survival into wastelands of poverty and destitution, on an angry planet that is not just murmuring its displeasure but screaming as it spirals out of kilter. Despite the warnings, we continue to suffer from a total breakdown of imagination, an inability to focus on the evidence before our eyes. What comes to mind as I say this is not only the images of the planet on fire in 2019 – Australia, the Amazon, Indonesia, Russia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Canada, Greenland, Spain and India burning out of control (Vasilieva, 2019) – but also the normalisation of foodbanks, child poverty, homelessness, depression, suicide and other symptoms of unwell, unsustainable, unequal societies that face us in our everyday lives. Across the planet, in countries rich and poor, shop doorways are turned into homes for the homeless, tents appear for shelter in the most unlikely places, donations for foodbanks are parked in supermarkets, refugees are cast adrift on dangerous seas … and we walk on by, failing to focus and failing to question why we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that this is normal, that there is no alternative, or TINA as it has come to be known. As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, in April 2021, as I write this, I sit here in my 14th month of social isolation, at the height of a coronavirus pandemic, a virus previously unknown to humanity, sinister, unseen, capable of killing swathes of the world’s population. This has done more than anything else to expose the grim reality of neoliberal politics, illuminating the full consequences of its greed and ruthlessness. I live in the North West region of England, an area systematically drained of its assets by the power base in the South East, creating enormous inequalities and rendering it vulnerable to the highest COVID-19 death toll in the country. I have witnessed my homeland, not only stripped of the quality of its infrastructure, but stripped of hope and dignity as wind-blown plastic waves alarmingly from the branches of trees and people walk by with heads bowed, surviving. This is the story of the short life of neoliberal politics from my experience, but it is the same story, to a greater or lesser degree, in most countries of the world. In the UK, neoliberal ‘austerity’ politics has plundered the public sector infrastructure of its support for a common good, systematically privatising its resources into the pockets of the rich. One of the greatest contradictions of this global pandemic is that it exposes the reliance of a population on the National 38
