Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Community Economic Development seeks to build long-term capacity in a community for equitable economic activity. Those are all key. There’s capacity, it’s long term and it’s equitable.
We cannot solve climate change or other symptoms of overshoot — including global injustices and the lingering threat of more pandemics — without really understanding and feeling deeply the lessons of wilderness, of ecology.
John Michael Greer’s new novel Journey Star, like his other fiction to date, delightfully resists categorization.
To face the complexities of the 21st century, we must be open to discussing how core elements of modern capitalism were founded upon and created to uphold white Western economic privilege, and still do.
Imagine a personal heating system that works indoors as well as outdoors, can be taken anywhere, requires little energy, and is independent of any infrastructure. It exists – and is hundreds of years old.
I do not know if this is a book for the ages, but it is certainly a book for our own apocalyptic times.
By collaborating with our community members and fellow growers, and sharing a variety of crops throughout the landscape, the diversity of food will expand beyond what we’d be able to manage singlehandedly.
It is apparent that our focus should not only be on solving climate change, but should also address other planetary boundaries, and perhaps even democratic renewal, but in every case, we need the means of transitioning from an unsatisfactory system to a better one that focuses on our strengths, and mitigates against our psychological shortcomings.
While capitalism has taught us to identify the first with money-making and the second with life-making – a necessary but nevertheless subordinated, dependent and qualitatively inferior activity – climate justice movements are claiming the progressive, i.e. egalitarian, emancipatory, and wealth-producing agency of reproductive forces.
With all the guff going on in Washington these days, it’s rather remarkable that Republicans and Democrats have managed—on occasion—actually to accomplish something positive. Standouts over the last twelve months include the pandemic relief bills and the bipartisan infrastructure framework.
Our wants will never be satisfied in a capitalist economy, and the demand for work will never cease. They are both prerequisites for and results of the expansion of capital.
Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and a renowned lecturer who has keynoted conferences and led workshops on the impact of commerce upon the environment. He addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
