Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If today nostalgia and alienation are among the main forces that keep the status quo intact, thus permeating the desolation of our world by the dominant system, then it is the recreation of the civic community and the genuine public that can help the 99% to self-empower themselves and enact crucial changes.
We must accept that some things can only be experienced and accepted. That they cannot be measured in a ‘hard’ way, and that our attempt to do so will kill the very thing we are trying to save.
In the ongoing discourse surrounding environmental justice, the concept of “green colonialism” has emerged as a critical lens to examine the historical and contemporary injustices faced by marginalized communities in the global South, including within the context of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
We can create conditions of emergence for a democratic, cooperative, commons-based, ecological clothing culture. To achieve this, international knowledge exchange will be sought alongside local experimentation. With determination, cooperation, and careful planning, new fibre systems will be possible.
A healthy diet costs in global average US$3.68 per day in 2021. This is considerably higher than the average food expenditure in almost all low income countries, where people have to do with a diet dominated by staples and oils, lacking protein and a number of micronutrients. The cost of healthy food is also out of reach for many people living above the World Bank’s extreme poverty line.
Perhaps the best you and I can do towards a better system is to stop believing in the current one, to withdraw from it (to a greater or lesser extent), and create new, gangster-free informal economic contexts.
The way I see it, demanding an explanation that fits in brains not adapted for that purpose is tempting but not justified: again putting humans first. We possess neither the right nor the hardware to know Ultimate Truth. But the allure of that trap is very difficult to resist or escape.
As Trump’s tariffs kick in, the Republican party is suddenly spouting anti-consumerist rhetoric that would make the Lorax smile. Should we cheer on this accidental experiment in economic shrinkage, or will this ham-fisted set of trade policies cause a backlash against the proponents of degrowth?
Whether it’s the environmental and health effects of nuclear mining in Diné (Navajo) territory, the bitter contentions around the Dakota Access Pipeline in the tribal territory of the Standing Rock Sioux, or the mining for copper on a sacred Apache site, it is clear that there have long been troubling issues at the nexus of Indigenous peoples and the United States’ energy infrastructure.
The not-so-secret ingredient in a healthy local food ecology is the embodied presence of those involved. Ecological agriculture cannot be practiced remotely. The only way to manage any landscape sustainably is by living in it long enough, and intimately enough, to learn how to manage it well.
The commons is essentially a parallel economy and social order that quietly affirms that another world is possible. And more: we can build it ourselves, now.
Every so often when reading an obituary of someone, or an awards citation, you realise that you have internalised their work into your thinking without having read it directly. So it was with Donald Shoup, the California transport academic who spent his life working on the problem of urban parking, and who died in February.
