Justin Kenrick is a co-author of the Feasta climate group’s book Sharing for Survival: Restoring the Climate, the Commons and Society. He is an anthropologist activist who lives in Portobello, Edinburgh, where he helped co-found PEDAL – Portobello Transition Town in 2005, and where he Chairs Action Porty which in 2017 undertook the first urban community right to buy in Scotland when it brought Bellfield Church and grounds into community ownership. He is a member of Extinction Rebellion having participated in the November 2018 blockade of the bridges in London, and the January 2019 Citizens Assembly occupation of the Scottish Parliament. He lectured in social anthropology at the University of Glasgow from 2001 to 2009, when he left to return to work for the Forest Peoples Programme supporting forest peoples – mainly in Kenya and DRC – to secure their community lands and determine their own futures.
Presenting Cap and Share to a Citizens’ Assembly in the Scottish Parliament
By Justin Kenrick, Feasta
The big change since the days of Richard Douthwaite and the 2012 publication of Sharing for Survival is that we now have zero faith in an international order being able to bring this about. Hence my presentation was focused on the need for Scotland to enact Cap and Share and show the way, rather than wait for a global agreement.
Resilience, Community Action and Societal Transformation: in Peterborough – Justin Kenrick
By Rob Hopkins, Justin Kenrick, Transition Network
Our chapter explores the Transition Movement of grassroots responses to climate change, peak oil and economic contraction, and seeks to place it in the broader context of commons-based responses to climate capitalism.
EU Referendum: 2 Transitioners debate ‘In’ or ‘Out’
By Justin Kenrick, Alexis Rowell, Transition Culture
There is just over a week to go until the UK votes on whether it wants to stay in the European Union, or to leave.
The Transition Movement in Global Perspective
By Tom Henfrey, Justin Kenrick, Transition Culture
The importance to Transition of both community and cultural commons is deep-seated.
Everyone is the Mother of Victory
By Justin Kenrick, Bella Caledonia
Everyone is the mother of victory; No one is the father of defeat.
Recognizing our rights to live in our forests is part of the solution to climate change
By Justin Kenrick, New Internationalist Blog
The Sengwer community has been repeatedly evicted by the government’s forest guards from their forests and glades at Embobut, high in the Cherangany Hills in Western Kenya.
The Climate and the Commons
By Justin Kenrick, Feasta
The premise of this chapter is that there is a proliferating movement of initiatives seeking to defend the commons (mostly in the Global South) or restore the commons (mostly in the Global North), to ensure our survival and well-being. This chapter is also premised on the notion that we still have time to act to restore our socio-ecological sustainability.
This hugely hopeful moment
By Justin Kenrick, Scottish Left Review
Even though there is huge fear, dislocation, unemployment and suffering powering through Europe and America just as it has been powering through so many other parts of the world for so long. Even when it becomes absolutely clear that in the current system, in order to keep those at the top ‘safe’’, everyone else is being pulverised as the financiers and their professional and political accomplices are rescued with the money of the rest of us. Even though that financial crisis is fast becoming a sovereign debt crisis and the free market’s gun is being held to country after country’s heads in Europe just as the IMF has done for decades elsewhere. Even though the oil tanker of economic growth is fast developing huge holes that no billions of dollars can plug. Even though, or should we say, because of this: we are living in a hugely hopeful moment.