A Call for Community-Based Seed Diversity During the COVID-19 Pandemic
We would be remiss not to sow true, place-based seed sovereignty in every region and among every culture on this planet, well before a future crisis could uproot us again.
Act: Inspiration featured
Preparing for the end of the world as we know it
Drawing on Indigenous critiques and practices from the communities we collaborate with in Brazil, Peru, Mexico and Canada, we propose that a decolonial future requires a different mode of (co-) existence that will only be made possible with and through the end of the world as we know it, which is a world that has been built and is maintained by different forms of violence and unsustainability.
Growing the Commonsverse: Rethinking Property
Property law as it is today systemically privileges the individual versus the collective, self-serving control over relationships, and exchange value over intrinsic or use value.
A swimming commons
Swimming can be re-politicised to create a profusion of swimming commons, that both embed the value of playful public abundance and nurture an ethic of more-than-human care.
Agroecology and Food Sovereignty
Birlik is building new connections between consumers and Small-Scale Fisheries that are accessible to people of all economic backgrounds, while protecting traditional fisher cultures, and providing an alternative vision of just, sustainable, fisheries.
Politics, Trauma and Empathy: Breakthrough to a politics of the heart?
We can choose to believe the future is inescapably set in stone, and thereby make it so; or we can dare to create an opening for a different future, and so give us all a chance.
Guidance from The Urban Commons Cookbook
The Urban Commons Cookbook seeks to answer such questions as: “Which ingredients of a cooperative community project most help it succeed? What are urban commons and how do they fit into current activist and civil society debates? And what tools and methods do commoners need to strengthen their work?“
What New Orleans’ Common Ground Collective can teach us about surviving crisis together
The Common Ground Collective’s successes and failures provide some useful insights into how to build new, effective mutual aid projects during this crisis and the next.
Why the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill could lead to a revolution of the imagination
One of the few rays of hopeful sunshine in the UK’s currently bleak political landscape is the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. In fact, I feel like it is such a vitally important development that I want to use this article to urge you to get behind it, while also offering a rather different perspective on why I feel it matters so much.
Leeds’s Local Response to Covid-19
Whilst the coronavirus crisis has presented extreme challenges and hardship for residents and organisations in Leeds, Sonja Woodcock hopes that the experience has strengthened the cities’ movement for fairer, sustainable food.
What if every city used Doughnut Economics?
Doughnut Economics is rapidly moving from the fringe to the mainstream. Amsterdam in Holland was recently confirmed as the first ‘Doughnut City’, using the model to underpin its economic development strategy.
‘Affective Labor’ in Community Forests in India
In other words, the inner lives of commoners, as commoners, have direct consequences for the external, material world. They are engaged in a symbiotic dance with living natural systems, a call-and-response conversation with the more-than-human plants and creatures of the forest.
