Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Bottom Up is a comprehensive primer on the transition to a new economy—the place-based movement to rewire the economy for equity and ecological sustainability. It is rich in stories and detail for the curious or discouraged and those seeking a strategy to move toward a sustainable and equitable future.
In central Pennsylvania Ellen Gerhart’s property lies about midway along the length of the Mariner East 2 pipeline that reaches from west to east across the state. It is slated to carry a variety of natural-gas liquids under high pressure to the coast and then exported onto the international markets. This project is not without opposition, however. The Gerhart family are one of a number of private property owners across the state who object to their land being confiscated using eminent domain laws and used to further global climate destabilization.
An innovative project stemming from the Hubs group in partnership with Transition Network to create a clear framework for how Transition groups and municipalities can create sustainable change together This project has been collaboratively designed across borders and will map existing experiences of effective and systemic-change collaboration between local authorities and transition initiatives, worldwide. Launched in early 2017, the project will initially run until the end of 2018.
It will take some time for Amrita Bhoomi to build a new food system. Chukki and KRRS have to resolve how to broadly distribute peasant-grown and saved seeds, how to strengthen markets for agroecologically produced food, and how to knit a coalition with farmer organizations across India. So far, however, Chukki said, “No zero-budget natural farming farmer has ever committed suicide or gone into debt.”
The Network of Wellbeing with support from the Big Lottery Fund helped launch the Share Shed Totnes in Devon, U.K., this year. It acts as a “library of things,” a place where people can borrow tools and other equipment that they need. These are all things that people might not be able to afford or want to buy.
American farm radicals from the American West of the 1880s and ’90s called themselves Populists. They blamed Eastern elites and the “moneyed power” — the one per cent of the Gilded Age — for their problems. Today’s media pundits tag angry but conservative farmers and blue collar workers as populists. This name-calling discredits people who pioneered the language and methods of grassroots democracy.
Dotted with ponds and brimming with wildlife, Duckworth Farm is 82 acres of secluded paradise. The entire property is open, save for a fence in the back protecting a relic Black Oak forest. “Just being here is a look back in time—at how this county would have looked 150 years ago,” explains Lorri.
The big takeaway from a week of multiple epiphanies and new friendships was the product of the students’ imaginations themselves. They are seeking to model and scale up a form of patient and profound knowledge-building they call “critical thinking communities” (CTCs)…
A new resistance camp, called L’eau Est La Vie (Water Is Life), opened over the weekend, on June 24. Based in southern Louisiana, the camp is against the 163-mile long Bayou Bridge Pipeline. The camp, according to a press release emailed to Colorlines, is made up of indigenous and environmental justice communities. Described as a “floating camp,” it sits among Louisiana’s wetlands and contains numerous indigenous art structures that are on rafts.
Sol Collective brings both the artist and activist communities together to collaborate on ideas and projects. In the past year, the space has hosted a wide array of concerts, films, poetry readings, open mic events, activism classes, health workshops, art exhibitions, social fundraisers, religious and cultural ceremonies, music performances, showcases, and theater performances.
We’re aware that we can’t look to anyone but ourselves to start generating forms of political activity that both overcome the unwelcome return of nationalism, and that genuinely increase the prospects for just, ecologically sound and equitable ways of organising our societies. These will necessarily be aimed at the end of capitalism and the nation-state, and towards democratically organized societies held in common.
How can technology lead to more participation in democratic processes? Who should own and control city data? Can cities embrace a model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation?
