Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If people can create their own livelihood, I won’t say business, because it’s more than just business — but if we can create and control own livelihoods, it eliminates the long legacy of exploitation, of abuse, that people — particularly black people — have suffered in this community.
Judicial decisions that favor climate defenders, in whatever guise, e.g., constitutional protections, compensation under tort laws, or in defense of civil disobedience [i], will fail to keep the rate of global warming within habitable bounds unless and until they lead to an aggressive and stable national integrated energy and environment policy.
Blacksmiths in Colorado use their anvils to turn guns into gardening tools, reshaping America’s gun culture one strike of the hammer at a time.
To get an idea of what we want the future to look like, we need to take inspiration from and learn from those already building the institutions of tomorrow, today. In the next few installments, we’ll be highlighting movements and initiatives that we think are some of the seeds of a new world, already sprouting.
The late John Peel once said of The Fall that they were “always the same, always different”. The same could be said of Ted Trainer’s critiques of Transition. He just published another one, many of the points in which he has made before, and I have already responded to here and here. But there are some elements to his latest critique which, on behalf of Transition Network, I would like to address.
In focusing on soil, Camp Altiplano’s ultimate goal is to learn how to bring degraded land back to life. If current rates of global soil degradation continue, it’s estimated we may only have 60 years of farming left.
In this article, I would like to propose some ways that an exchange of knowledge and knowledge-sharing strategies between permaculture and degrowth would be beneficial for both movements. This argument is based on the idea that the most interesting and diverse areas of any system are located at the edge, where one system, community, or way of thinking intersects with another.
“Knowing that we need better jobs and a good environment? That’s all you need to know to tell your lawmakers,” Short says. “It’s up to us to express our will.”
Humans and our livestock now make up 97 percent of all animals on land. Wild animals (mammals and birds) have been reduced to a mere remnant: just 3 percent. This is based on mass. Humans and our domesticated animals outweigh all terrestrial wild mammals and birds 32-to-1.
Close to where I live is a project called Landworks. Landworks describes itself as “an independent charity providing a supported route back into employment and community for those in prison or at risk of going to prison”.
This year, the US Worker Cooperative National Conference is being held in Los Angeles, California, but it will not be the first time cooperators have converged in the state. As cooperative historian John Curl documents below, California has a long history of cooperatives and collective action of all kinds.
A method being applied more widely in the food system today is an economic model called true cost accounting, which identifies and quantifies the total cost of food and agricultural production depending on the type of farming system.
