Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Drawing on historical examples of people power uprisings and on his recent work examining how general strikes and broader “social strikes” are built, in this conversation Brecher reflects on where the U.S. is now, what conditions make such actions possible, and what strategic groundwork is required to turn diffuse outrage into sustained, democratic power.
Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer were each present at many such critical moments of strategic decision-making, and their stances influenced the outcome of the movement as a whole. As Baker put it, “people have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but themselves.”
Venezuela’s supposedly vast reserves of crude oil aren’t what they seem to be.
And while the center burns itself to ash, life goes on. Pretty much as it always has. With bad and good, joy and grief, pain and beauty and such wonder. Give attention to that, to the reality of your life, because that’s the best medicine for bewilderment. And it’s also… just life…
The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is written for ‘engineers (and other humans)’ who want to “transform the built environment industry into a force for good.” Despite coming into the “other human” category here, I found its mental models and some of its thinking devices useful.
We have our greatest democratic possibilities in the communities where we live, and this is where we can begin to turn around the trend to concentrated oligarchic power that threatens democracy as a whole. We must build the future in place.
Authority, for materialist monists, issues from the universe as directly accessed, assuming matter is real (rather than imagined, as in idealism). Materialist monists do not presume that we know better: that the universe is incapable of producing all that we experience based on the constituents and interactions on full display.
We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.
Perhaps our long experience of sitting around campfires together and talking about what’s going on in the world around us, and what we ought to do about it next, can be recovered and put to good use again.
Moving forward effectively requires clarity about the limits of conventional finance – and the creation of new finance vehicles that honor the deep complexities of commoning and ecosystems at bioregional scales.
Mainstream economists and environmentalists share something in common. Both tend to tout efficiency — think better light bulbs — as the solution to climate change and all our other environmental problems. But the little-understood Jevons Paradox intervenes to overwhelm any progress that comes from improved efficiency.
In a recent article I summarized arguments for reversing the trend toward globalization of economies and cultures, aiming instead for the flourishing of communities rooted in their bioregions (i.e., regions defined by characteristics of the natural environment rather than human-imposed borders). For readers receptive to those arguments, the fundamental follow-up question is, “How?”
