Inspiration

Tiny Houses Alone Can’t Solve the Housing Crisis. But Here’s What Can

By Chris Winters, YES! magazine

For Julia Rosenblatt, the solution to affordable housing was to move in with friends and family—more than 10 people under one roof. Rosenblatt, a co-founder of the HartBeat Ensemble theater group in Hartford, Connecticut, had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in local activist communities. The year was 2003, the United States had launched a war in Iraq, and the post-9/11 environment was making her think differently about what kind of life she was going to have for herself and her family. An initial group of about 20 people liked the idea of creating an intentional community: living together with a shared set of goals and values to have a life that would be more meaningful, less harmful to other communities and the environment—and more affordable.   In 2008, six people moved into one house. The big move came in 2014, when those six were joined by five more...

  • May 25, 2018

Paris is Building the Eco-Community of the Future Right Now. Here’s How.

By Susannah Shmurak, Ensia

May 23, 2018 — Every so often an environmentally friendly building gives us a glimpse of the low-carbon future so many climate plans envision. With the development of Clichy-Batignolles, the city of Paris has created a groundbreaking eco-village filled with such buildings. Begun in 2002, the massive redevelopment project is about 30 percent complete and is slated to be finished in 2020. In 2007, Paris became one of the first municipalities in the world to adopt a climate action plan, setting goals for greenhouse gas emission reductions above and beyond those outlined by the European Union. Employing virtually all the tools in the green builders’ toolkit, Clichy-Batignolles aims to be tangible evidence of the city’s commitment to reducing its carbon footprint as well as an experimental laboratory for testing what’s possible in climate-sensitive redevelopment. What used to be a train yard is being turned into an urban park surrounded by...

  • May 25, 2018

Relocalising the Food Chain: Why it Matters and How to Do it

By Jane Powell, Sustainable Food Trust

One of the greatest benefits of local food is that it enables the public to form a new relationship with the people who grow and process their food. We can meet the producers and ask questions. What chemicals are they using? Do their animals look well cared for? Are they a good employer? Do they contribute to their community?

  • May 25, 2018

Dreaming of the School Birthed in Flames

By Joe Brewer, Medium.com

I am dreaming of the school birthed in flames. The work that I do has no place in current universities. It is too holistic, too integrative, and too practically oriented toward the real world.

  • May 25, 2018

Grains of Truth and Falsehood About Grain, Bean, and Veggie Storage

By Wayne Roberts, Medium.com

New disaster planning standards for a newly urbanized, wired, hyper-complex and vulnerable world mean that food storage needs to be reevaluated and re-appreciated in light of global considerations that were not considered back in the 1990s, when the need for public control of food storage was poo-poohed.

  • May 24, 2018

The Choice of a Canon

By John Michael Greer, Ecosophia

Having a list of books that everyone more or less agrees that young people should read in school doesn’t just provide a common ground of ideas that fosters communication; it doesn’t just help budding readers find really good books to read; it also teaches them how to think.

  • May 24, 2018

P2P: A New Cycle of Post-Civilisational Development

By Michel Bauwens, Rajani Kanth, Commons Transition

Peer to peer is a relational dynamic which allows every individual to connect ‘permissionlessly’ to any other individual. You could call it ‘networking freedom’ if you like.

  • May 24, 2018

Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Personal Resilience

By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org

In discussing climate change and all our other eco-social predicaments, how does one distinguish accurate information from statements intended to elicit either false hope or needless capitulation to immediate and utter doom? And, in cases where pessimistic outlooks do seem securely rooted in evidence, how does one psychologically come to terms with the information?

  • May 24, 2018

Fight Hunger and Grow Food with America’s Grow-a-Row

By Alaina Spencer, Food Tank

America’s Grow-a-Row works to positively improve the lives of people in the Northeast United States by planting, harvesting, rescuing, and delivering fresh produce to those in need, free of charge.

  • May 23, 2018

Reordering The Anthropocene

By Matt Hern, Am Johal, Red Pepper

Reaching past narrow definitions of exploitation to consider the other-than-human world allows us to speak of domination more broadly. It opens us up to what nonexploitative, nondominating relationships might require politically, but it also demands alternatives.

  • May 23, 2018
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