Sometimes it’s truly uncanny how synergistic human consciousness can be. I’ve always thought that the world as it exists is the result of what we collectively dream into being, and if a lot of people dream the same thing at the same time, this dream and all its interconnected threads is bound to rapidly and visibly manifest in the waking world.
Still, as comfortable as I consider myself to be with such sublime convergences, I admit that it threw me for a galactic loop when Congresswoman and Green New Deal resolution co-author Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tweeted “a very special + secret #GreenNewDeal project” announcement mere minutes before I sent the draft of the creation story you’re about to read to my collaborating editors.
“Holy cow,” I thought to myself. “A creative Green New Deal storytelling project! This is exactly the kind of stuff we’ve been building our hub for.”
When the surprise — a beautiful, visionary video entitled A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez— was revealed the next morning, I was stunned by how much the storyline, the visuals, and the aspirational nature of this moving piece of contemporary art fit into what we’d been dreaming up over the last several months.
The Art of the Green New Deal
The idea for some sort of a creative hub that would turn the hapless U.S. president’s iconic paean to selfishness and greed into a playfully subversive ode to possibility and regeneration had initially come to me during a weekend in the woods in November 2018. It began to take real shape during a Green New Deal Create-a-thon a month after the resolution had been released. During a weekend of collective brainstorming, we fleshed out the framework for The Art of the Green New Dealas “a journal of creative culture shift that would collect andchronicle the creative endeavors in support of the adoption and implementation of the Green New Deal.”
One of the many common threads between A Message from the Future and our vision for the journal are the references to the art programs that flourished during the original New Deal era. In Naomi Klein’s clarion call accompanying the video, she not only muses that a Green New Deal could “galvanize artists into that kind of social mission again,” but that the time to crank up the turbines of inspiration is in fact right now, because we’ll need all artistic hands on deck to “help win the battle for hearts and minds that will determine whether it has a fighting chance in the first place.”
Speaking of Naomi Klein, I can’t help but wonder if she was writing those lines at the exact moment I added the quote about the “ethos of care and repair” from her previous Green New Deal article to this story (see below). Also, did we somehow tune into the wavelength of the Message from the Future crew when we came up with a Letters from the Future column during the create-a-thon?
Whether it’s all providence I’m not sure, but with all the existential social, economic, and environmental challenges we’re facing on this planet it seems significant that so many of the same powerful ideas are suddenly bubbling up from sea to shining sea. And The Art of the Green New Deal, in a nutshell, is poised to catch the most beautiful, diverse, and expressive of those bubbles that tell the stories of how a Green New Deal will help transition our nation into a society that lives within Earth’s carrying capacity and where everyone can thrive.
A showcase for the creative human engagement needed to bring about the shift, the idea is to start this project as a well curated online journal. From photo essays and creative non-fiction to video, audio and media yet unseen, it will stream the resolution’s various interconnected pillars — from clean energy and sustainable food systems to social/economic equity and community resiliency — through the portals of Works, Movements, and Narratives. There is no shortage of ideas of what it could become in the long run.
If you’re ready to jump aboard, you can follow us now on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram where we’ll keep you posted on when the site will launch, how to contribute, and other updates.
Perhaps we might also start a group here on Daily Kos dedicated to telling the creative stories of the GND. Hit me up in the comments.
If you want to go deeper, read on…