Brian, recently retired, worked for three decades in the Department of History at the University of California, Riverside. He specialized in twentieth-century U.S. intellectual and cultural history. He writes now as an advocate for localization, which he sees as the most promising strategy for defusing the many crises we face and reconnecting to the things that make life pleasurable. His essays and a “localist manifesto” are available at occupythehearth.org.
Humane Values, Human Scale
Humane values, if they are to find a field of exercise, must be broadcast over a terrain populated by institutions that operate at human scale.
May 9, 2024
Leo Infrastructure
Only as visionaries will we get a realistic chance of narrowing the gap between the world we got and a world we would be happy to live in.
April 3, 2024
The Future of Beauty
If the grounded sense of beauty Momaday derived from Kiowa cultural expressions is to play a role in shaping our response to social and ecological collapse, it will need a territory that can sustain it.
February 12, 2024
On Being Reasonable
A new mass constituency for fundamental change – the new way of reasoning made flesh – is visible amidst the blight and the rot. No member of this constituency would find it reasonable to trade clean air for cheap household items, health and justice for toys and gadgets.
October 2, 2023
“Rude music,” empathy, and the case for localism
If we want a future different from the one now bearing down on us with a full load of menace, we must fight for it as localists.
March 21, 2023
Karl Marx in the Anthropocene
Now that we have glimpsed for the first time a planet-wide threat to all that lives and breathes, we might acknowledge at long last that we have been poorly served by a mode of understanding that must turn everything into the same kind of lock – the same mechanism – before it can proceed.
September 22, 2021