Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this article, I would like to propose some ways that an exchange of knowledge and knowledge-sharing strategies between permaculture and degrowth would be beneficial for both movements. This argument is based on the idea that the most interesting and diverse areas of any system are located at the edge, where one system, community, or way of thinking intersects with another.
Close to where I live is a project called Landworks. Landworks describes itself as “an independent charity providing a supported route back into employment and community for those in prison or at risk of going to prison”.
This year, the US Worker Cooperative National Conference is being held in Los Angeles, California, but it will not be the first time cooperators have converged in the state. As cooperative historian John Curl documents below, California has a long history of cooperatives and collective action of all kinds.
James Kagwe, who runs a waste management collective called ‘Waste to Best’ in Naivasha Town in Kenya’s Rift Valley. His path has taken him from flower growing to street clean-ups, waste collection and waste management.
We may benefit if we simultaneously hold two extremes of action; both the huge, universal movements for ecology and justice and the daily, personal actions that help slightly and make us better examples to others.
Although creating an alternative culture requires effort, some effort is also put in maintaining the dominant culture. So the question is where to put the effort.
Our very nature is far more caring, loving, and empathic than we have been educated to believe. While being empathic may have initially extended primarily to our family and tribe, our ability to empathize has continued to expand to include the whole of humanity, other species and life as a whole.
Since the fall, indigenous women of the Secwepemc Nation—calling themselves the Tiny House Warriors—have been constructing tiny houses that they plan to strategically place in the pathway of the proposed Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
I would estimate that two thirds to three quarters of our base was not involved politically before the 2016 election. My goal is to help build political power alongside these folks in my community, and in other communities across the country.
The EJAtlas shows that people all over the world, organised in groups and networks, struggle for the kind of world they want to create, and in doing so, are promoting sustainability.
Whether you consider yourself an economic veteran or novice, now is the time to uncover the economic graffiti that lingers in all of our minds and, if you don’t like what you find, scrub it out; or, better still, paint it over with new images that far better serve our needs and times.
It is time for communities to take up financing their foodshed. Doing so can grow regional food economies and bring a new crop of supporters into the tent of Local Food.
