Lost in the fog of carbon state dominance, climate activists face oppression like that encountered by dissidents in Communist controlled Eastern Europe. Elite profiteers use their billions to buy off politicians, disseminate propaganda, attack scientific facts, and create false needs. Parallel Polis 2030 is a process and space to stop the madness.
The parallel polis is a socio-political concept enunciated by the Czech political thinker and dissident Vaclav Benda, a theoretical framework for a new society. The Czech parallel polis hastened the collapse of the communist dictatorship. Likewise, Parallel Polis 2030 works to hasten the dead weight of the carbon state's collapse upon itself, softening the blow through the creation of new forms of resistance and alternative ways of living.
Elites consolidate their power by isolating us, fragmenting social bonds, and enforcing a false and destructive life narrative. Elite oppression can be summarized as “divide and conquer.” In opposition, Parallel Polis 2030 creates an umbrella of ideas, support structures, and learning opportunities. Everyone is invited, but virtue hoarding is prohibited.
Without transformative and oppositional structures for support, asking people to confront climate genocide is akin to demanding they search in the dark. Thus, Parallel Polis 2030 emphasizes reawakening, becoming radically human. Participants preserve the best of our civilization, like monastery librarians in the Dark Ages, while creating a genuine counter-ideology.
Parallel Polis 2030 is a call to creativity, an alliance of the willing who no longer carry the baggage of traditional politics. It doesn't just resist the Elites; it ignores their incessant efforts to infect rational thought and suppress spirituality. While Parallel Polis 2030 supports sustainable and localized communities, nature refuges, re-wilding projects and well-considered withdrawal, its primarily focus is transformative and oppositional. It works to stop climate genocide the only way possible: creating democratic structures to grow the nonviolent power necessary to shut down the carbon state.
We reference 2030 because it marks the end of the last decade of "normal." During 2030s the temperature deviation above pre-industrial levels will trigger increasingly devastating climate impacts: prolonged heatwaves, water scarcity, agricultural failure, desertification, and rising sea levels. The Earth's natural carbon sinks, oceans and forests, will begin collapsing. Mass migration will intensify, killing tens of millions while creating crisis conditions in the Global North and South that lead to political upheaval and in some cases, the collapse of state institutions.
Necessary cultural, spiritual, and political change will not happen overnight. For now, Parallel Polis 2030 can't help but carry a mythical or romantic aspect - seeming to relate more to the future than to present realities. But that's a positive, not a negative, because Parallel Polis 2030 serves to sustain activists in the belief that their sacrifices and resistance are worthwhile, and their action will eventually save human civilization.
