Act: Inspiration featured

In the Clearing

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From February to December 2017, the grounds of Compton Verney Art Gallery hosted a collaborative artwork by Alex Hartley and Tom James (who published part of his Future Manual here two years ago). Inspired by the utopian communities of the 1960s, the Clearing is a geodesic dome constructed from reclaimed materials on the shore of a lake, and occupied year-round by a succession of ‘caretakers’ – an evolving experiment in reskilling and living off grid, ‘a reconstruction of the future as it might be.’ 

What I Really Said on the Canary Islands

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The platform cooperativism movement intervenes at a moment of social crisis in the United States when ninety-four percent of jobs created over the past decade were not in the employment category. In 2016, over twelve million workers have made money on labor platforms. Much of that work is invisible with laborers often exploited, tucked away between algorithms. And over the long-term, as more labor markets shift to the Internet, it also matters that ownership of cloud services and social hangouts on the Internet is highly concentrated.

Website for Collaboration on Resilience Projects

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NOW the Path Forward is an educational website based on Moodle (http://moodle.org). It’s purpose is to grow solutions under an open source umbrella and use the educational tools such as wikis for collaboration. In this scenario, the teachers are actually teacher/moderators and the students are student/collaborators. Do not think of the courses in a traditional sense, but rather as work space. Participants can contribute at any level they prefer. Lurking is allowed.

Permaculture Sewage Treatment – First Aid and Future Proofing for our Rivers and Seas

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If we want to create sustainable, healthy systems to support us, we cannot rely on such a fickle friend as fossil energy for electricity generation to keep our sewage treatment systems running smoothly. Quite apart from the increasing potential for power cuts in a changing world, when conventional sewage infrastructure “runs smoothly” it is still heavily reliant on the constant use of electricity to convert biomass and nutrients into somewhat less polluting effluent before disposing to our rivers and coastal waters. Clearly in a world desperately in need of solutions that work, this needs to change.

How Northwest Communities Are Stopping Big Oil Projects

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Steinke’s advice for others who want to make a difference: “Show up, speak up, and make your case repeatedly. Without advocates, nothing happens. Elected officials don’t want to rock the boat, but if you rock it, they will be receptive.” And, if Steinke’s experience is any indication, the deeper sense of community and commitment that results could be oxygen for local revolution.

A County of One Million Declares First-in-Nation Climate Emergency

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On Tuesday December 5, thanks to the efforts of TCM organizers, the County Council of Montgomery County, Maryland unanimously passed a resolution declaring climate emergency — making it the first county in the nation to do so. The County also moved its emissions reductions goal up from 80% in 2050 to 100% by 2035, and is newly greatly emphasizing the need for developing and scaling the county’s capacity for carbon drawdown.

Kenya’s Sarafu-Credit: Alternative Economies & Community Currencies Pt. 2

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In the second of our three part series on alternative economies and community currencies, we spotlight Kenya’s Sarafu-Credit. Community currencies are types of complimentary currencies shared within a community that are utilized as a means of countering inequality, class, debt, accumulation, and exclusion.

Check Out This Seed Library in Boston and Learn How to Start Your Own

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Around the globe, seed lending libraries have been sprouting up in public libraries. The seed libraries function very much like regular libraries, except instead of books, you check out seeds and bring them back once you’ve harvested them. These programs aim to improve access to seeds and preserve seeds for future generations. Seed libraries are just one way people can share seeds.

Learning with our Senses

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I wonder if the process of learning and discovering with our senses isn’t really what makes us human, what makes our life worthwhile.  Perhaps this is how as humans we evolved our ‘big’ brains, our specialized neural networks.  Maybe in exploring the word with our senses and trying to make sense of it all, we developed language in order to tell stories,  we developed writing in order to keep records, and in the process we advanced our social group from tribes into culture and from culture into civilizations.

Josiah Meldrum on Imagination and Getting the British to Love Beans Again

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We want a business that’s sufficient that pays our wage, pays the wage of the people that we employ, allows us to do all the things that we enjoy, but there’s still a huge opportunity for lots of other businesses operating all over the UK, like Grown in Totnes, to flourish in the same way.  So yeah, it’s exciting.

Start Small – The Story of Bec Hellouin Permaculture Farm

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You have to take the time to train yourself. You have to take the time to convince yourself or to test yourself in the profession, to dirty your hands in the soil and to really see what it’s all about. There is a lot of fantasy around these projects but there’s also a reality which is difficult. It can be absolutely incredible, but it can be a nightmare if it’s done without preparation, without a good human design, without a good design for the site.

Zen in the Art of Permaculture Design: Review

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It is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, that Stefan Geyer, an artist and hotelier with many talents, models his book Zen in the Art of Permaculture Design on. The book, a light, bright blue novelette, is Geyer’s meditation on a life of permaculture and meaning, and hints how to use permaculture design to shift one’s perception to both the natural world and our own human nature using the lens of Zen Buddhism techniques.