Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We need all hands on deck to ideate new ways to equip the Youth Movement with a holistic, radical approach. To generate systemic change, young activists must be brave in their criticism of capitalism and growth. Unfortunately, they must also get comfortable with doubt, not knowing exactly what tomorrow will look like.
Ten years ago, I started teaching at Bard’s Green MBA Program, where I now teach classes in economics, economic development, community investment funds, and “sustaining mission.” And what I can report is that the several hundred students I taught have created, run, or improved an amazing assortment of mission-oriented enterprises.
We don’t really see the violence that historically underlay and still underlies the globalised ‘free’ trade that defines the modern world because a lot of effort has gone into forgetting it. Better, I’d argue, to embrace the role of the settled local farmer-householder (which in fact many of the Vikings were too) who knows how to produce their own livelihood from the land.
From alpine pastures and salmon fisheries to offshore wind farms and online encyclopedias, commons take many forms. This article explores a wide range of real-world commons that span geographies, culture, and domains.
This would not be the first time a system has an ideology or an official cause for existence that is contrary to the actual workings of the system. That has rather been the rule during most of human history.
What might happen to innovation when we shift our goals towards making societies happier and more equitable, within planetary boundaries?
This week’s Frankly unpacks humans’ current identification with the label “consumer.” Consumption is something much deeper and more nuanced than shopping or spending. Nate highlights the ways that it shows up across our whole lives – from basic needs and stability to status and mental escape.
If the United States were to abandon that trajectory and take the concrete actions that are needed to achieve equitable ecological renewal, what elements of life in the present-day Global North would we necessarily, and gladly, leave behind?
Data-driven models of self-organization and critical collective phenomena in the natural world and within traditional Indigenous sociocultural structures, along with adaptive context-based frameworks, can help guide the transboundary development of a decentralized and circular socio-bioeconomy for the Amazon.
“Anthropause” is an amazing word and the latest book about it is an eye-opener. Stan Cox’s Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth (2026, Seven Stories Press), does what far too few degrowth books do – it first focuses readers’ attention to the positive experiences we could enjoy in a society less dedicated to producing unnecessary stuff. It then details the destructiveness of overproduction.
As Hyde shows, gift economies of reciprocity are particularly important to artists and creative communities in their functioning as commons.
In the interests of both local and global sustainability, we need to redesign the economy by recognising two separate spheres of exchange, representing two different kinds of values.
