Speed and Localism
By Patrick Noble, Feasta
If we are to mitigate catastrophic climate change and also reverse the catastrophically increasing chasm between rich and poor, first, we must reclaim the common.
Culture and Climate
By Patrick Noble, Feasta
Tinkering with improvements to our current ways of life is futile. We must each of us change how we live, or else be changed forever by our own effects.
On Being Conservative for the Common Against those Who Are Conservative for Enclosure
By Patrick Noble, Feasta
Because most political, social and working life is enclosed, people falsely conclude that our struggle must be to improve those enclosures – not to step gently into the wood. That choice, to weave improvements into the wires, is the course taken by most of the liberal left. It endorses enclosure.
The Music of Time – or How We’ll not Change the Music unless we Change how We Sing
By Patrick Noble, Feasta
An enclosure is no less than right to amorality, freed from the ancient obligations of the common. It follows that our task is to evacuate enclosures and reclaim the common.
The Tales of History are a Dead-End Road
By Patrick Noble, Feasta
Culture is what people do. It decays when people stop culturing. Changing a culture means changing what we do. Often, that will need a step by step transition as we negotiate obstacles.
The Ninety Percent and the Tithe
By Patrick Noble, Feasta
All I’ll need of my current wage will be a tithe. We’ll keep the tithe and refuse the rest. We’ll keep just a living, breathing Earth and refuse the strata of those many millions of sequestered and fossilised years. “Keep the tithe and refuse the rest!” could prove a populist slogan, or the refrain to a popular song.
The Great Agricultural Resettlement or the Next Chapter of the Fall
By Patrick Noble, Feasta
I am a farmer and that is where my world begins. What is an agriculture? I say it is a culture of cities, towns and villages, bridges, roads, canals, harbours – of trades’ people and the trades, which have been created by the specialised cultivation of fields. The industrial revolution was a revolution within agriculture – germinated by fossil fuels, so that today, nearly every culture on Earth is an agriculture.
The Good Life or the Ballot? Both you Say? I Say the Good Life First, the Ballot Second.
By Patrick Noble, Feasta
But there is hope. It is (as it has always been) in living the good life. Though such a course may fail, until it does so, it remains a source of happiness. It is now the only productive course we have to mitigate the worst of climate change. By all means speak to the powers – you never know – and this writer is frequently wrong – but without rapid and then hopefully fashionable personal change, there’s not a realistic hope in hell…