Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Where markets “commodify” and states “collectify”, Commons initiatives “commonify”: rooted in a culture of collaboration around the needs of a community, they mutualise the benefits that arise from collectively created wealth—through systems owned, governed, and maintained by the community itself.
In Hamlet, the prince ultimately acts—but only after much hesitation, after much suffering. Let us not wait until we are beyond saving to make our choice. To plastic, or not to plastic? That is not just a question. It is one of the defining moral decisions of our time.
It is the modernists, not the villagers, who are the “narrow provincials.” It is the believers in Progress who have chained daring and dynamism to petty purposes and passive self-absorption. That belief has bloodied the past and will do the same in any future built to its specifications.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate considers the ways in which our social species overvalues false confidence rather than the more honest and inquisitive response of “I don’t know.”
The United States is broken. We should consider a more decentralized democratic order as what comes next.
The natural gas industry promised Americans an endless abundance of gas. There’s lots of gas (for now), but it’s increasingly going elsewhere and that spells less gas and higher prices for Americans.
And folks like comfortable Gaians, who are focused on long-term visions of civilizations that peacefully-coexist with Earth, who advocate for degrowth, who embrace planetary limits, and who would rather spend time in nature than in protest meetings, we, too, have to come together with the diverse anti-fascist coalition to fight for Gaia’s right to thrive.
Presently, the major currents of thinking on both the mainstream political left and right seem fatefully enraptured with the centralized politics of the nation-state, believing that if the correct government is in place it will deliver what the people really want. If people were to stop thinking that, we may be at the start of a politics equal to present times.
Many people question the meaning of life embedded in capitalism, or rather that there is no meaning of life embedded in capitalism. It is a system without a higher purpose and its only moral doctrine, if any, is the (flawed) notion that all will be better off if we just think about our own interest.
Because what we’re doing isn’t just resisting. We’re reclaiming the democracy we always should have had from those who would rule us as kings.
In this episode, Nate is joined by economic writer and strategist, Stacy Mitchell, to explore how concentrated economic power shapes the health of towns and cities – from economic resilience to social connectedness.
I wonder, how do the swallowtails drink if too many people buy meat from grocery stores? How does the blood return to the soil? How do the coyotes and the vultures feast on the entrails from the farmer and the hunter? Our wedges, our separation, spills over into all of life. A chink in the chain. We cannot divide ourselves without dividing everything.
