With economic and ecological crises deepening, more people are facing the harsh reality that modern high-energy/high-technology ways of living—along with the economic system out of which they emerged—have to change if the Earth is to sustain a large-scale human presence in the future. If the American “way of life” is incompatible with a sustainable future, how do we start to talk about, and create, a new way of being in the world?

In this talk, “Coping with the Cascading Crises of our World,” delivered at the University of Texas at Austin, professor Robert Jensen tells the story of a “plain radical,” a person whose political and personal choices offer a painfully honest but hopeful example. An edited version of the talk, “After the harvest — learning to leave the planet gracefully,” is online at Waging Nonviolence.

Video courtsey of Jeff Zavala,Grace Alfar, and Austin Indymedia.