Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Before the Industrial Revolution, people added a temporary layer of textile insulation to either the interior or the exterior of a building, depending on the climate and the season. In cold weather, walls, floors, roofs, windows, doors, and furniture were insulated with drapery and carpetry. In hot weather, windows, doors, facades, roofs, courtyards, and streets were shaded by awnings and toldos.
So, when people ask me for one thing they can do to bring about a more positive future, I suggest they seek out stories of real change that are happening right now. I’m talking about local food projects, renewable energy projects and neighbourhoods coming together to create their own solutions.
Denmark is about to give its citizens ownership rights in their images and voices to protect them from unscrupulous AI-generated deep fakes. I think the ownership of personal information should go a lot further.
As Graeber puts it in his lecture on Care and Freedom, “We need to reimagine production and consumption.” We need to produce ‘Care’ not money, and this is really the central ethos of the Care.Home.Farm project.
The archetypal, self-governing citizen in SMPLCTY is the poet-farmer (or poet-carpenter, etc.), who lives simply in a material and energetic sense, contributes to necessary economic production and community governance in non-hierarchical conditions, and who otherwise explores the good life through creative activity and aesthetic experience.
One of the most singular and accomplished commons I’ve ever encountered is Cecosesola, a federation of Venezuelan cooperatives. The remarkable federation artfully manages multiple ventures as commons while deeply immersed within a system of capitalist markets.
From the corridors of the Parliament down to the provincial governments, the shift from fossil fuels to renewables is being framed as both inevitable and immediate. Yet beneath the veneer of urgency and technological optimism lies a deeper tension, who defines this transition, and in whose interest is it unfolding?
If today nostalgia and alienation are among the main forces that keep the status quo intact, thus permeating the desolation of our world by the dominant system, then it is the recreation of the civic community and the genuine public that can help the 99% to self-empower themselves and enact crucial changes.
We must accept that some things can only be experienced and accepted. That they cannot be measured in a ‘hard’ way, and that our attempt to do so will kill the very thing we are trying to save.
In the ongoing discourse surrounding environmental justice, the concept of “green colonialism” has emerged as a critical lens to examine the historical and contemporary injustices faced by marginalized communities in the global South, including within the context of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
We can create conditions of emergence for a democratic, cooperative, commons-based, ecological clothing culture. To achieve this, international knowledge exchange will be sought alongside local experimentation. With determination, cooperation, and careful planning, new fibre systems will be possible.
A healthy diet costs in global average US$3.68 per day in 2021. This is considerably higher than the average food expenditure in almost all low income countries, where people have to do with a diet dominated by staples and oils, lacking protein and a number of micronutrients. The cost of healthy food is also out of reach for many people living above the World Bank’s extreme poverty line.
