Farming for the Long Haul: Excerpt
We need farmer- controlled advocacy organizations that are constantly alert to our particular needs as small farmers, engaged in creative adaptation to a changing agricultural reality.
Act: Inspiration featured
This City Made Access to Food a Right of Citizenship
To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons.
300 Million Poets: Amateur Poetry and Our Imminent Reconnection to the Land
How do we live our lives, enmeshed as we are in this increasingly-toxic soup of early-stage civilization collapse, to make the most of today and perhaps bestow upon our children a livable tomorrow? And the answer for me comes down to strengthening relationships.
Youth – a New Horizon for Climate Communication
This discrepancy begs the question: if carbon emissions keep rising, and our behaviors and lifestyles are not changing, what does that say about our current climate communication initiatives and messengers?
New Generations Meet New Alternatives: the Commons and the Youth Initiative Program
One of the worst effects of capitalist realism is the endless bad-mouthing of alternatives to its toxicity. With this in mind, I’d like to share with you some extraordinary examples of imaginative prototyping exercises towards commons-oriented futures — presented by the very people who will bring them about in the face of darker possibilities.
Helen Marriage on The Sultan’s Elephant and Large Acts of Public Imagination
We took everybody on a journey that said the arts too have their place in the life of a city, and that the city doesn’t just have to be about shopping and traffic, that it’s as important for people collectively to share these moments, moments like this, as it is for them to share or to experience moments in their own life.
A New North American Network Emerges from the Grassroots
Symbiosis, an expanding network of revolutionary organizers and local initiatives, is assembling a confederation of democratic community institutions across North America. This project has been gathering support over the past year and will be launched at a continental congress in Detroit from September 18-22.
Edible Acres at Powell Gardens Feed and Educate Students to Chefs
Approximately 45-minutes drive from Kansas City, Powell Gardens’ Heartland Harvest Garden is America’s largest edible landscape, providing the perfect backdrop for culinary events and education. It’s a place where 60 students capped off a recent visit by helping to make salsa and where a two-year-old CSA is in full swing.
For Love of Place: Reflections of an Agrarian Sage
“Come, friends, let us sit down together. Not in a lecture hall, not in a laboratory, not in a political forum. Here on the banks of the Kentucky River, let us sit down together and see what went on here. What’s going on here now? Why is it the way it is now? What do we want?”
A Taste of Palestine: Cultivating Resistance
On this culinary tour with a twist, we travelled the West Bank meeting farmers and food producers, eating in local restaurants and with families in refugee camps and Bedouin villages. Heartening and heart-wrenching in equal measure, the ten days spent exploring Palestinian food culture showed a people with a deep love for the land and the food traditions that come with it.
Dismantling Patriarchy in NYC’s Solidarity Economy
Quietly and in secret in summer 2014, we began venting frustration with recurring sexism in worker co-ops, food co-ops, and solidarity economy organizing in New York City, and beyond.
Realists of a Larger Reality
The [future] economy will depend for its existence on a deep foundation in culture. It is possible to live without it, but only for a time, like holding your breath under water. Or as one of his readers put it – when productivity improves, “in our system you have a problem; in Fleming’s system you have a party.”
