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The Land Knows the Way: Eco-Social Insights for Liberation
The Land Knows the Way: Eco-Social Insights for Liberation is a collection of political medicines – gathered and gleaned from six decades of trickster art and activism, the long history of peoples’ movements, and the deep rhythms of our planet’s ecology
The Land Knows the Way offers ways to creatively and effectively respond to living in times that are, on the one hand, unprecedented and unique, and on the other, part of longstanding and familiar historical cycles. If we are to learn from what history and ecology have to teach us, we need to become reacquainted with both. But don’t expect a road map. From the preface:
“There’s no map with our route marked out for us. Maps are useful instruments. They are like a snapshot of the lay of the land at a moment in time. But in a landscape constantly shifting, they are not enough. Effective strategies do not emerge from certainties, but from attentiveness. We need to be able to read the land—in its natural, social, and historical dimensions—sense changes in wind direction, identify opportunities and spot hidden dangers.”
The Land Knows the Way offers ways to creatively and effectively respond to living in times that are, on the one hand, unprecedented and unique, and on the other, part of longstanding and familiar historical cycles. If we are to learn from what history and ecology have to teach us, we need to become reacquainted with both. But don’t expect a road map. From the preface:
“There’s no map with our route marked out for us. Maps are useful instruments. They are like a snapshot of the lay of the land at a moment in time. But in a landscape constantly shifting, they are not enough. Effective strategies do not emerge from certainties, but from attentiveness. We need to be able to read the land—in its natural, social, and historical dimensions—sense changes in wind direction, identify opportunities and spot hidden dangers.”
372 pages, Paperback
Published February 4, 2025
2 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
About the author
Ricardo Levins Morales
8 books3 followersRicardo Levins Morales began drawing pictures of chickens on the small Puerto Rican farm where he spent his childhood. Raised in the anti-colonial movement, he absorbed critical politics along with the sun, rain, and rhythms of his homeland.
He experienced adolescence in Chicago at a time of political ferment. He was active in the movement to end the war against Viet Nam as well as in support of the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, school strikes, and community struggles. He drew his first leaflet for a Black Panther fundraiser.
After dropping out of High School worked in a variety of manufacturing and service industries (and racked up 26,000 miles of hitch-hiking). He became involved with the labor movement during a union organizing drive at the Boston hospital where he worked as a janitor.
Moving to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1976, he worked in service and home weatherization jobs while teaching himself silk screen printing—eventually finding work as a printer. In 1979, joining with other activist artists, he helped found the Northland Poster Collective which sought to link artists with social justice organizing. During this time he was involved in environmental organizing with mobilized small farmers in central Minnesota, support for the resistance to the Chilean dictatorship, and in producing concerts with political Latin American musicians. In this work he met Paula Holden with whom he has raised two children, Olivia and Manuel.
He continues to work at Northland, which has become an artistic center for the United States labor movement and works with a variety of grassroots struggles. He continues to be involved in activist, educational, and artistic projects in the labor movement.
Ricardo considers an organizer as much as an artist and emphasizes building organic relationships with the movements and communities for whom he produces art.
Source: http://ricardolevinsmorales.com/ricar...
He experienced adolescence in Chicago at a time of political ferment. He was active in the movement to end the war against Viet Nam as well as in support of the Black Panther Party, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, school strikes, and community struggles. He drew his first leaflet for a Black Panther fundraiser.
After dropping out of High School worked in a variety of manufacturing and service industries (and racked up 26,000 miles of hitch-hiking). He became involved with the labor movement during a union organizing drive at the Boston hospital where he worked as a janitor.
Moving to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1976, he worked in service and home weatherization jobs while teaching himself silk screen printing—eventually finding work as a printer. In 1979, joining with other activist artists, he helped found the Northland Poster Collective which sought to link artists with social justice organizing. During this time he was involved in environmental organizing with mobilized small farmers in central Minnesota, support for the resistance to the Chilean dictatorship, and in producing concerts with political Latin American musicians. In this work he met Paula Holden with whom he has raised two children, Olivia and Manuel.
He continues to work at Northland, which has become an artistic center for the United States labor movement and works with a variety of grassroots struggles. He continues to be involved in activist, educational, and artistic projects in the labor movement.
Ricardo considers an organizer as much as an artist and emphasizes building organic relationships with the movements and communities for whom he produces art.
Source: http://ricardolevinsmorales.com/ricar...
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March 15, 2025
Such an offering with wisdom and humor, coming from knowing so deep it doesn't need to be spoken in hackneyed, academic phrasing. Deep bows.
(see esp p242-244)
1. How can I invite you to a place where you already live?
11 The key to bringing people over to our side isn't about "meeting them halfway." It's about making a better offer. <> [....] The coming home to our authentic selves that is at the heart of social liberation and trauma healing [...] coming home to a future that we have never seen but have always known and for which we yearn with every cell and fiber in our bodies.
15. The deal is that you'll stop rocking the boat is they accept your demands. [...] This is an effective strategy for winning advantages within the existing power structure.
20. The Soil is more important than the Seeds.
68 We have to fight for these things because under capitalism a human need is a vulnerability to monetize.
70. Once something is "owned," it can be made scarce -- and profitable.
82. Dependence is vertical. Solidarity, as any barrio child or Harlem poet could tell you, is horizontal.
90. Cutting a path before people are ready to walk it is a necessary aspect of a movement's strategy. [...] The idea that we must "meet people where they're at" is often misinterpreted. It is taken to mean that we should figure out what beliefs they are comfortable with and stay within those bounds.
91. Being willing to advocate for ideas not yet widely accepted has been at the heart of the right's successful rise to power.
96. The foundation-dominated left, having long ago abandoned ideas of justice in favor of adjustments, has been unable to offer any political vision beyond the soft-core neoliberalism of the Democratic Party. To galvanize a people, a movement must speak to both people's material and emotional hungers. The fascists do that, but deceptively [...]
119. The ideological and propaganda machinery of empire is devoted to preventing us asking larger questions. Questions large enough to contain solutions.
138-9. <> "Beneath every behavior there is a feeling," writes family psychologist Ashleigh Warner. "And beneath every feeling is a need. And when we meet that need rather than focus on the behavior, we begin to deal with the cause not the symptoms." She was talking about seven-year-old children but could be talking about everyone.
My strategy, more instinctive than calculated, was what therapists today would call"pacing and leading." Pacing is about creating rapport [...] . It can start with mirroring the client's body language -- how they sit, how much they make eye contact or scan the room, how they speak. Not so much that it seems like mockery. Just enough to share a wavelength.
154. Tecumseh's strategic legacy is his clarity about lines of demarcation. By analyzing the real, underlying interests of the different forces at play [....]
156. Tecumseh's strategy was not to "speak truth to power," but to speak power to power.
158. Assimilation, simply put, is an agreement to trade solidarity in exchange for inclusion.
159. To choose solidarity over inclusion is to stake your future on hope for a better deal than the power structure has put on the table. It means that we make other people's struggles our own, cultivating relationship ad mutual support in place of competition.
160. The promise of assimilation, on the other hand, is status and access. Throwing others under the bus is your ticket to a place at the table.
163 Bargaining away solidarity for the promise of inclusion rarely ends well. Not for the grassroots people in the community, anyway. Remaining aloof from the struggles of others allows the power brokers of the system to pick us off one by one. The day usually comes when you wish the people you threw under the bus were still around to help you.
[…] We choose the best option on the menu. Or what looks best, from where we stand. Solidarity is a pretty good offer. […] Making a real offer requires making a commitment. […] Reciprocal. Unlike betrayal, which is a transaction. You get paid, but the relationships are broken.
Solidarity. We have to make the case for it. We’re always bidding against opportunism – who has deep pockets. […] So make the offer. Keep making it. Always make the offer.
172. I simply decided one day that I’d devote fifteen minutes every day to some project that was not a crisis response.
174. The power of investing – in mind and by action steps – in a future you don’t fully believe in, has remained with me.
182 The camouflage strategy of lizards, changing colors to blend with their surroundings, isn’t safety. It’s an accommodation to danger. I still struggle to know the difference.
189 I have long thought of myself as an Ella Baker organizer trapped in a Martin Luther King, Jr. world. […] King […] once declared, to the irritation of Baker, his ally and frequent critic, that “leadership never ascends from the pew to the pulpit, but … descends from the pulpit to the pew.”
198. Simply insisting that it’s “unthinkable” is not an effective form of protection.
206. Malcolm was practicing therapy – on a mass scale. [see page for more details]
210. Offering connection in place of isolation is the basis of solidarity organizing.
217-8 The head-on collision between the endless growth that is at the heart of capitalism and the finite, interdependent nature of the ecological world, makes an ultimate collapse inevitable. […] The rejection of rationality is essential for convincing large numbers of people to embrace the system’s suicide pact. […]
Catastrophe, at the scale of humanity and the planet’s ecological web, is where the logic of capitalism is propelling us. The goal of revolution, on the other hand, is to bring about a controlled collapse of the existing system and its reconfiguration, through collective action, into a restorative one.
223 I think the best advice I can figure out – for myself as much as anyone – is to keep asking “what are we missing?” “What’s the bigger picture here?” “What feedback loops are we setting in motion?” “What conversations are we shutting down?” “What will we wish, ten years from now, that we’d paid more attention to?”
228 People's aspirations take organizational form. We come together to make things happen. We solidify into structures of our creation. In a political landscape with only one pole, organizations are born already attached to the system through an umbilical cord of funding and status and a surrounding ideological environment. Fifty years of an organizing model dependent on corporate funding has cost us, and the world, dearly. It has weakened our capacity to ask big questions and challenge big power and, of course, take big action. But those are still what's needed. We must name what we really want, state it clearly and often, and shape it collectively. "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago," goes the popular saying, "The second best time is now."
233 The cultural nutrients of a community are found in its stored memories and values, and these are retained and circulated through stories.
234 […] “pre-organizing” […] Sometimes the conditions for organizing aren’t in place and need to be created for actual organizing to become possible. (see also P236)
238. So when we talk about dividing our enemies, we often mean dividing our actual enemies – who benefit the most from oppression – from those they’ve tricked. (see 239 for examples Cuba and Guinea Bissau – united vs popular front; 240 Palestine: guerilla vs mass non-violence; 283 Nicaragua; 308 Mozambique)
242 “Since you have killed, abducted, and traumatized our children we get to do it to yours.” That would certainly be even-handed, which is what fairness is about. But it won’t bring us closer to a just world. In fact it would make it harder to achieve. A just world requires broader thinking. During treaty negotiations in 1876, Tatanka Yotanka (known in English as Sitting Bull) proposed a more appropriate framework. “Let us put our minds together,” he is quoted as telling his opponents. “And see what kind of future we can build for our children.”
244 My father often said that when the legitimate aspirations of different groups appear to be in conflict, they are not asking a big enough question. […]
Liberation isn’t easy, just necessary.
And I don’t believe it will be fair. Fairness is about accounting. Justice is about healing. […] Healing is about asking what we most deeply need … and offering it to each other. […] the question is “what kind of future can we build for our children.” It’s the only one large enough to hold all our wounded hearts.
250 Algerian revolutionary women wrned their Black Panther sisters […] that they should not take for granted that their gains during the struggle would be honored after victory.
252 The Federation of Cuban Women […] attributed Cuba’s high divorce rate to the conundrum that Cuban women were looking for men from the future, while the men were seeking women from the past.
262 It has also produced stifling bureaucracies, cults of personality, and top-down command regimes. […] These are the legacies of what my father called the “first drafts of socialism,” with all the false starts, bold experiments, and cautionary tales that implies.
265 When we meet on the picket line, in the assembly hall, or in the prison yard, it’s what you bring to the struggle that matters most, not whose picture you have on your wall, or whether you embrace, disavow or redefine your own political or spiritual heritage. Just give me a hand unloading these boxes. There’s work to be done.
272 Action is medicinal. To witness the great harms being perpetrated in the world, and not do whatever I can to end them, would, to me, be like being exiled from my humanity. Being able to participate in the struggle to minimize, reverse, or prevent harm is, to me, the essence of being home.
281 I didn’t know much about asking for help. I’m still no expert.
284 The cultural transformations that must sustain a structural change are an ongoing process. They must be strategically cultivated – before, during, and after a political or social regime change. Culture, like muscles, can take time to catch up. Until it does, the adjustment itself will not be stable.
306-7. Witnessing people coming into their power signaled to my own battered nervous system that healing is possible. [...] For some folks, the struggle itself could be a source of trauma, especially when subjected to abusive treatment in the movement or violent repression from without. For my part, it left me with the deep conviction that the struggle to heal the world should itself be healing. If your work for liberation is demoralizing and depleting, there's something wrong with how it is being done. It will be hard at times, of course, or sad or scary, but it should not erode the spirit.
309. Sometimes people need time to heal before they can settle on a collective future that will be just and sustainable. "The first thing is to create a basis for consoling the whole country," according to Graca Machel, Mozambican revolutionary and Minister of Education.
311 There's a class aspect to the way progressive programs are received -- or not. Middle-class people, generally speaking, respond well to blueprints and are more easily captivated by the marketplace of ideas. Working-class culture prioritizes relationships and values unity and loyalty. Great proposals are fine, but someone who has reliably stood by you is invaluable.
313. The romanticized notion that revolutions are led by central committees of almost mystical ability becomes an obstacle to strategic and tactical creativity.
Building grassroots power and participation in a movement involves rice. We have to offer more than a list of grievances, or even a beautiful vision.
315. There's rice for the belly but there's also rice for the spirit.
316. An effective radical program should make people hungry for change even if they're not yet ready to reach for it. Or, to put it differently, it should remind people what they're hungry for. My starting principle when it comes to a program for large scale change, is that it should be clear enough and simple enough that it could be explained by a second grader.
317. To coax the heart out of its confinement we must not only offer a language of hope and liberation that speaks to it, we must also demonstrate it in practice. That includes practicing kindness and integrity both within and beyond our movement spaces. [...] so that each arena of action ceases to be an isolated achievement and becomes a door, opening toward a better way to be.
320. The passage from denial to acceptance is called grieving. It's not something we like to do. But until we pass through it, taking the time and feeling the feelings that it requires, we can't be fully present in a world that demands our full presence.
325. I think it would be a fine idea if all organizations would chant their mission at the start of every meeting (they'll have to start composing more musical mission statements!). Doing it together creates bonds of accountability. It reminds us that we're in it together.
326. Basically, we have better offers for the people of the world, but our opponents have a massive sound system. Their songs are lousy, but they're loud and on repeat, so that's what people end up humming to themselves.
3 made out of stories or atoms?
10. Chicago Black Panthers building a Rainbow Coalition including inviting alliance with Young Patriots and their Confederate symbols -- how far this is from a cry for safe spaces and trigger warnings!
33 Efficiency vs organizing
53. organic tensions -- managing not resolving
57. Questions to ask
61. solidarity and social rx
64. Apathy (like LN workshop) vs unskilled organizer or therapist
68 dependence; internalized oppression
69 role of unemployment
71. wanting to go home
80-1. rent parties: why do they work? and structural impediments to solidarity
92. why bold vision is part of leadership
98-101. history as tides and tidepools (King, Horton, choirs)
105 liberals and radicals -- Frederick Douglas
107 successful capitalist leadership --> doom
113-15. Change, spirals, biodiversity
122 growth and cancer
127 exploitation and (limited) democracy
128-9 racism's job
134. reservation schooling -- praise & shame or mutuality
135. ... re my exp w AP English
173. Urgency/patience and writing (see Samantha Sweetwater)
176. coffee houses as places to work
178-9. rebellions
193. Bay of Pigs. A popular uprising no one was interested in.
199. defend the public space
201-3, 289, 310. The Democrats (assessment of rx with left and climate catastrophe); liberalism's limits
208. trauma response to broken trust in organizing
231-2. Eritrea and other post-revolution disappointments… how we build them
232 tactical lies in service to strategic truths (?)
237. conflict strategy
269 place and rule making
271-74 trauma, recovery, politics
285 perseverance
294. movement veterans vs elders
322-3. strategic grieving
330. climate change as threat to capitalism
331. Aurora on interdependence
(see esp p242-244)
1. How can I invite you to a place where you already live?
11 The key to bringing people over to our side isn't about "meeting them halfway." It's about making a better offer. <> [....] The coming home to our authentic selves that is at the heart of social liberation and trauma healing [...] coming home to a future that we have never seen but have always known and for which we yearn with every cell and fiber in our bodies.
15. The deal is that you'll stop rocking the boat is they accept your demands. [...] This is an effective strategy for winning advantages within the existing power structure.
20. The Soil is more important than the Seeds.
68 We have to fight for these things because under capitalism a human need is a vulnerability to monetize.
70. Once something is "owned," it can be made scarce -- and profitable.
82. Dependence is vertical. Solidarity, as any barrio child or Harlem poet could tell you, is horizontal.
90. Cutting a path before people are ready to walk it is a necessary aspect of a movement's strategy. [...] The idea that we must "meet people where they're at" is often misinterpreted. It is taken to mean that we should figure out what beliefs they are comfortable with and stay within those bounds.
91. Being willing to advocate for ideas not yet widely accepted has been at the heart of the right's successful rise to power.
96. The foundation-dominated left, having long ago abandoned ideas of justice in favor of adjustments, has been unable to offer any political vision beyond the soft-core neoliberalism of the Democratic Party. To galvanize a people, a movement must speak to both people's material and emotional hungers. The fascists do that, but deceptively [...]
119. The ideological and propaganda machinery of empire is devoted to preventing us asking larger questions. Questions large enough to contain solutions.
138-9. <> "Beneath every behavior there is a feeling," writes family psychologist Ashleigh Warner. "And beneath every feeling is a need. And when we meet that need rather than focus on the behavior, we begin to deal with the cause not the symptoms." She was talking about seven-year-old children but could be talking about everyone.
My strategy, more instinctive than calculated, was what therapists today would call"pacing and leading." Pacing is about creating rapport [...] . It can start with mirroring the client's body language -- how they sit, how much they make eye contact or scan the room, how they speak. Not so much that it seems like mockery. Just enough to share a wavelength.
154. Tecumseh's strategic legacy is his clarity about lines of demarcation. By analyzing the real, underlying interests of the different forces at play [....]
156. Tecumseh's strategy was not to "speak truth to power," but to speak power to power.
158. Assimilation, simply put, is an agreement to trade solidarity in exchange for inclusion.
159. To choose solidarity over inclusion is to stake your future on hope for a better deal than the power structure has put on the table. It means that we make other people's struggles our own, cultivating relationship ad mutual support in place of competition.
160. The promise of assimilation, on the other hand, is status and access. Throwing others under the bus is your ticket to a place at the table.
163 Bargaining away solidarity for the promise of inclusion rarely ends well. Not for the grassroots people in the community, anyway. Remaining aloof from the struggles of others allows the power brokers of the system to pick us off one by one. The day usually comes when you wish the people you threw under the bus were still around to help you.
[…] We choose the best option on the menu. Or what looks best, from where we stand. Solidarity is a pretty good offer. […] Making a real offer requires making a commitment. […] Reciprocal. Unlike betrayal, which is a transaction. You get paid, but the relationships are broken.
Solidarity. We have to make the case for it. We’re always bidding against opportunism – who has deep pockets. […] So make the offer. Keep making it. Always make the offer.
172. I simply decided one day that I’d devote fifteen minutes every day to some project that was not a crisis response.
174. The power of investing – in mind and by action steps – in a future you don’t fully believe in, has remained with me.
182 The camouflage strategy of lizards, changing colors to blend with their surroundings, isn’t safety. It’s an accommodation to danger. I still struggle to know the difference.
189 I have long thought of myself as an Ella Baker organizer trapped in a Martin Luther King, Jr. world. […] King […] once declared, to the irritation of Baker, his ally and frequent critic, that “leadership never ascends from the pew to the pulpit, but … descends from the pulpit to the pew.”
198. Simply insisting that it’s “unthinkable” is not an effective form of protection.
206. Malcolm was practicing therapy – on a mass scale. [see page for more details]
210. Offering connection in place of isolation is the basis of solidarity organizing.
217-8 The head-on collision between the endless growth that is at the heart of capitalism and the finite, interdependent nature of the ecological world, makes an ultimate collapse inevitable. […] The rejection of rationality is essential for convincing large numbers of people to embrace the system’s suicide pact. […]
Catastrophe, at the scale of humanity and the planet’s ecological web, is where the logic of capitalism is propelling us. The goal of revolution, on the other hand, is to bring about a controlled collapse of the existing system and its reconfiguration, through collective action, into a restorative one.
223 I think the best advice I can figure out – for myself as much as anyone – is to keep asking “what are we missing?” “What’s the bigger picture here?” “What feedback loops are we setting in motion?” “What conversations are we shutting down?” “What will we wish, ten years from now, that we’d paid more attention to?”
228 People's aspirations take organizational form. We come together to make things happen. We solidify into structures of our creation. In a political landscape with only one pole, organizations are born already attached to the system through an umbilical cord of funding and status and a surrounding ideological environment. Fifty years of an organizing model dependent on corporate funding has cost us, and the world, dearly. It has weakened our capacity to ask big questions and challenge big power and, of course, take big action. But those are still what's needed. We must name what we really want, state it clearly and often, and shape it collectively. "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago," goes the popular saying, "The second best time is now."
233 The cultural nutrients of a community are found in its stored memories and values, and these are retained and circulated through stories.
234 […] “pre-organizing” […] Sometimes the conditions for organizing aren’t in place and need to be created for actual organizing to become possible. (see also P236)
238. So when we talk about dividing our enemies, we often mean dividing our actual enemies – who benefit the most from oppression – from those they’ve tricked. (see 239 for examples Cuba and Guinea Bissau – united vs popular front; 240 Palestine: guerilla vs mass non-violence; 283 Nicaragua; 308 Mozambique)
242 “Since you have killed, abducted, and traumatized our children we get to do it to yours.” That would certainly be even-handed, which is what fairness is about. But it won’t bring us closer to a just world. In fact it would make it harder to achieve. A just world requires broader thinking. During treaty negotiations in 1876, Tatanka Yotanka (known in English as Sitting Bull) proposed a more appropriate framework. “Let us put our minds together,” he is quoted as telling his opponents. “And see what kind of future we can build for our children.”
244 My father often said that when the legitimate aspirations of different groups appear to be in conflict, they are not asking a big enough question. […]
Liberation isn’t easy, just necessary.
And I don’t believe it will be fair. Fairness is about accounting. Justice is about healing. […] Healing is about asking what we most deeply need … and offering it to each other. […] the question is “what kind of future can we build for our children.” It’s the only one large enough to hold all our wounded hearts.
250 Algerian revolutionary women wrned their Black Panther sisters […] that they should not take for granted that their gains during the struggle would be honored after victory.
252 The Federation of Cuban Women […] attributed Cuba’s high divorce rate to the conundrum that Cuban women were looking for men from the future, while the men were seeking women from the past.
262 It has also produced stifling bureaucracies, cults of personality, and top-down command regimes. […] These are the legacies of what my father called the “first drafts of socialism,” with all the false starts, bold experiments, and cautionary tales that implies.
265 When we meet on the picket line, in the assembly hall, or in the prison yard, it’s what you bring to the struggle that matters most, not whose picture you have on your wall, or whether you embrace, disavow or redefine your own political or spiritual heritage. Just give me a hand unloading these boxes. There’s work to be done.
272 Action is medicinal. To witness the great harms being perpetrated in the world, and not do whatever I can to end them, would, to me, be like being exiled from my humanity. Being able to participate in the struggle to minimize, reverse, or prevent harm is, to me, the essence of being home.
281 I didn’t know much about asking for help. I’m still no expert.
284 The cultural transformations that must sustain a structural change are an ongoing process. They must be strategically cultivated – before, during, and after a political or social regime change. Culture, like muscles, can take time to catch up. Until it does, the adjustment itself will not be stable.
306-7. Witnessing people coming into their power signaled to my own battered nervous system that healing is possible. [...] For some folks, the struggle itself could be a source of trauma, especially when subjected to abusive treatment in the movement or violent repression from without. For my part, it left me with the deep conviction that the struggle to heal the world should itself be healing. If your work for liberation is demoralizing and depleting, there's something wrong with how it is being done. It will be hard at times, of course, or sad or scary, but it should not erode the spirit.
309. Sometimes people need time to heal before they can settle on a collective future that will be just and sustainable. "The first thing is to create a basis for consoling the whole country," according to Graca Machel, Mozambican revolutionary and Minister of Education.
311 There's a class aspect to the way progressive programs are received -- or not. Middle-class people, generally speaking, respond well to blueprints and are more easily captivated by the marketplace of ideas. Working-class culture prioritizes relationships and values unity and loyalty. Great proposals are fine, but someone who has reliably stood by you is invaluable.
313. The romanticized notion that revolutions are led by central committees of almost mystical ability becomes an obstacle to strategic and tactical creativity.
Building grassroots power and participation in a movement involves rice. We have to offer more than a list of grievances, or even a beautiful vision.
315. There's rice for the belly but there's also rice for the spirit.
316. An effective radical program should make people hungry for change even if they're not yet ready to reach for it. Or, to put it differently, it should remind people what they're hungry for. My starting principle when it comes to a program for large scale change, is that it should be clear enough and simple enough that it could be explained by a second grader.
317. To coax the heart out of its confinement we must not only offer a language of hope and liberation that speaks to it, we must also demonstrate it in practice. That includes practicing kindness and integrity both within and beyond our movement spaces. [...] so that each arena of action ceases to be an isolated achievement and becomes a door, opening toward a better way to be.
320. The passage from denial to acceptance is called grieving. It's not something we like to do. But until we pass through it, taking the time and feeling the feelings that it requires, we can't be fully present in a world that demands our full presence.
325. I think it would be a fine idea if all organizations would chant their mission at the start of every meeting (they'll have to start composing more musical mission statements!). Doing it together creates bonds of accountability. It reminds us that we're in it together.
326. Basically, we have better offers for the people of the world, but our opponents have a massive sound system. Their songs are lousy, but they're loud and on repeat, so that's what people end up humming to themselves.
3 made out of stories or atoms?
10. Chicago Black Panthers building a Rainbow Coalition including inviting alliance with Young Patriots and their Confederate symbols -- how far this is from a cry for safe spaces and trigger warnings!
33 Efficiency vs organizing
53. organic tensions -- managing not resolving
57. Questions to ask
61. solidarity and social rx
64. Apathy (like LN workshop) vs unskilled organizer or therapist
68 dependence; internalized oppression
69 role of unemployment
71. wanting to go home
80-1. rent parties: why do they work? and structural impediments to solidarity
92. why bold vision is part of leadership
98-101. history as tides and tidepools (King, Horton, choirs)
105 liberals and radicals -- Frederick Douglas
107 successful capitalist leadership --> doom
113-15. Change, spirals, biodiversity
122 growth and cancer
127 exploitation and (limited) democracy
128-9 racism's job
134. reservation schooling -- praise & shame or mutuality
135. ... re my exp w AP English
173. Urgency/patience and writing (see Samantha Sweetwater)
176. coffee houses as places to work
178-9. rebellions
193. Bay of Pigs. A popular uprising no one was interested in.
199. defend the public space
201-3, 289, 310. The Democrats (assessment of rx with left and climate catastrophe); liberalism's limits
208. trauma response to broken trust in organizing
231-2. Eritrea and other post-revolution disappointments… how we build them
232 tactical lies in service to strategic truths (?)
237. conflict strategy
269 place and rule making
271-74 trauma, recovery, politics
285 perseverance
294. movement veterans vs elders
322-3. strategic grieving
330. climate change as threat to capitalism
331. Aurora on interdependence
December 4, 2025
One of the best books I've read in a long time and arrived at a time I needed it!
There are many books out there that attempt to provide organizing wisdom and history for today's organizers (including some I've liked and others that I've liked less). But to me, this hit all the notes that are needed in this moment in a way no other book does. New organizers will find essential stories, frameworks, and historical reference points, and be introduced to an insight so rarely encountered today--that it is not only pain, sacrifice, burnout, and isolation, but also joy, connectedness, and belonging that generations of revolutionaries have found and built in committing their lives to liberation. But this book is not only for new organizers--longtime organizers across ideological lines will find chapters that distill key lessons, look at the history of people's struggles in new ways, and ask us to step back from the weeds of our work and see it differently (though not in the vague ways this is often done).
This volume is refreshingly--blissfully!--free of both jargon and ideas originating in nonprofits and academia. It is not peddling nonprofit-backed strategies/tools, theory(TM), or reformism. It is promoting: regular people struggling together to build a world beyond capitalism. I can't really emphasize enough how much of a balm to the soul that is. The writing is clear, accessible, and pleasurable to read. It is, in every way, written for people who are not academics or steeped in nonprofit lingo in a way so few books are on the left. It is designed to be like a series of conversations with a movement elder and is deeply effective in achieving this. I'm so grateful to Ricardo Levins Morales that this book exists and that I can now recommend it to every organizer I know.
There are many books out there that attempt to provide organizing wisdom and history for today's organizers (including some I've liked and others that I've liked less). But to me, this hit all the notes that are needed in this moment in a way no other book does. New organizers will find essential stories, frameworks, and historical reference points, and be introduced to an insight so rarely encountered today--that it is not only pain, sacrifice, burnout, and isolation, but also joy, connectedness, and belonging that generations of revolutionaries have found and built in committing their lives to liberation. But this book is not only for new organizers--longtime organizers across ideological lines will find chapters that distill key lessons, look at the history of people's struggles in new ways, and ask us to step back from the weeds of our work and see it differently (though not in the vague ways this is often done).
This volume is refreshingly--blissfully!--free of both jargon and ideas originating in nonprofits and academia. It is not peddling nonprofit-backed strategies/tools, theory(TM), or reformism. It is promoting: regular people struggling together to build a world beyond capitalism. I can't really emphasize enough how much of a balm to the soul that is. The writing is clear, accessible, and pleasurable to read. It is, in every way, written for people who are not academics or steeped in nonprofit lingo in a way so few books are on the left. It is designed to be like a series of conversations with a movement elder and is deeply effective in achieving this. I'm so grateful to Ricardo Levins Morales that this book exists and that I can now recommend it to every organizer I know.
December 1, 2025
What a treat to read Ricardo’s wisdom in book form, divided into chapters that interweave nature insights, social movement history, and personal history. In the way it combines close observation with the natural world and social movements, it reminded me of Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy, and I would certainly recommend this book to fans of that one.
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