Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It seems clear to me now what SolarAid should do in the next year. We should try to work with enough of those companies and organisations, in clever enough ways, that we play a useful role – maybe a catalytic role, if we can – in ensuring that civilisation passes The Test.
Our guiding principle in exploring these possibilities is that the democratization of land ownership requires the democratization of capital. To reach this goal, it’s likely that all of the strategies discussed above – community control of land, worker ownership, and non-extractive finance – will need to work together in order to ensure an equitable and sustainable future for farmland.
Jonny Gordon-Farleigh took up this theme of how co-ops can be more involved in delivering an economy that benefits people, focusing on local authorities and heritage. “There are some real strategic opportunities for co-ops to work in these sectors,” he said, citing the example of Preston, where local procurement had increased and the worker-owned business model was favoured for council contracts.
As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.
My argument is that a healthy democratic society is inherently participative and if it is not then the institutions of democracy will wither away as a smaller group take all the decisions, in their own interest, shutting out everyone else.
Join Anya Schoolman of the Community Power Network and John Farrell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance who will lead a discussion on how states and communities can push past Trump’s dirty energy agenda, drive down energy cost and boost renewable energy growth.
A handful of states around the country have begun to recognize the importance of carbon farming as an expedient tool to fight climate change. What’s carbon farming? Eric Toensmeier, author of The Carbon Farming Solution, describes it as “a suite of crops and agricultural practices that sequester carbon in the soil and in perennial vegetation like trees.”
A newer garment construction project is being birthed using Community Supported Cloth (CSC), a new Climate Beneficial Wool cloth supply chain lofted by Fibershed.
The “community of food practice” is maturing in Toronto as people in the city link local food, global foods, urban agriculture, community development, food security, food sovereignty, multiculturalism and interculturalism.
The process by which capitalist investment seeks to reengineer and privatize nature, government, social life and even genes and physical matter is at once breathtakingly ambitious, subtle and insidious. The great contribution of Dr Peter Doran’s A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism is to show how this process is also aimed, with systemic zeal, at human consciousness itself.
What would it be like to be mobilized by my government — and I emphasize “my” because as far as I’m concerned, Donald Trump’s version of it doesn’t qualify — into some collective effort to make this country a better place.
In only a few months, a small encampment of a few Lakota people dedicated to protecting the Missouri River from the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) became the center of international attention, swelled to house up to 14,000 people at its peak in early December 2016, and was supported entirely by volunteers and countless donations of both money and goods.
