Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
You can consider Open Collective an infrastructure for commoning — a backend system that makes it easier and more normal for people to manage money fairly, collectively, and with open accountability.
Our legal status [as a GAEC or farm cooperative] allows us to do a lot of things: from growing vegetables to hosting classes, tourists, cultural events, catering… It encouraged us to open the field of possibilities. You can do things but at the same time stay true to yourself and the life you want.
Real solutions, such as building an organization like the AMO, require time to build trust and relationships. It also means overcoming the legacy of failed government and nonprofit promises to impoverished communities.
If we want to reclaim the control over our cities and societies, we cannot limit our action to the internet, we also need to take to the physical space of urdan environments – the streets and the public squares. This is the revolutionary potential of cities and that’s why I put so much emphasis on it.
I have taken to heart the insight that possibly, the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis; that we see this thing we call ‘the climate’ through a window whose frame is itself the product of our toxic culture.
Christina Baldwin is a writer, wanderer, and teacher on the trail of community and story; she is co-founder, with Ann Linnea, of PeerSpirit, Inc. and The Circle Way Process, bringing modern structure and application to the human heritage of circle. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Given the documented superiority of stewardship on Indigenous-managed lands around the world, Housty and his colleagues argue that the place-based, values-based approach to conservation outlined in the paper should be emulated elsewhere. It’s time to “go back to what works,” he says, “because we’re going in the wrong direction.”
Stories and myths and scripture were originally oral and adaptive to changing social and ecological conditions and political climate. So I think the main thing about this interstitial space is always inviting my readers in to change me, to risk being changed by our conversation.
Transition Berkeley has cultivated a community of practice that hits close to ground zero – a “culture of repair,” that demonstrates a way to live with more humility, making do with what we have by sharing knowledge and skills, one repair at a time.
One of Strong Towns’ core insights on local food is “let people grow food where it makes sense.” This includes letting residents grow their own produce gardens in the front yard.
Some rare good news came down from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently. In a 2-1 decision, the court rejected an Environmental Assessment (EA) that would have green lighted expansion to the Bull Mountains underground coal mine near Roundup, Montana.
The answer is that to avert the worst effects of climate change, tamp down on pollution, and avoid ecological destruction and the sixth extinction, everything—ethics, economics, business practices, basically the whole of modern industrial society, needs to change, to be conducted along different lines, and fast.
