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Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution

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Beautiful Trouble lays out the core tactics, principles and theoretical concepts that drive creative activism, providing analytical tools for changemakers to learn from their own successes and failures. In the modules that follow, we map the DNA of these hybrid art/action methods, tease out the design principles that make them tick and the theoretical concepts that inform them, and then show how all of these work together in a series of instructive case studies.

How a Universal Basic Income could Fire the imagination

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UBI is basically an idea that says everybody, simply by virtue of being alive, gets an income that gives them enough to survive, if not thrive, and that’s one of the debates.  There are lots of different people talking about it right now from across the political spectrum.  This is one of the things that makes it an interesting idea, or an idea that’s worth engaging with right now, because it’s an idea that’s emerging.  It’s formulating, so it’s not settled.

The Return of the Peasant: or, the History of the World in 10½ blog posts. 3. From the Ancient to the Medieval

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In ideological terms, these developments eventually resulted in an impressive intellectual and political culture of the high middle ages involving notions of corporate identity and religious transcendence – one that was rigidly inegalitarian, albeit admitting to various critiques of the established hierarchy.

Beyond Harvey and Irma

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Think of this as the new face of homeland security: containing the damage to America’s seacoasts, forests, and other vulnerable areas caused by extreme weather events made all the more frequent and destructive thanks to climate change. This is a “war” that won’t have a name — not yet, not in the Trump era, but it will be no less real for that.

Data Technologies Colonize the Ontological Frontier

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Writing recently in Medium, Salvatore Iaconesi — a designer, engineer and founder of Art is Open Source and Human Ecosystems — offers an extremely important critique of the blockchain and other data-driven network technologies. While recognizing that these systems have enormous potential for “radical innovation and transformation,” he astutely warns against their dangerous psychological and cultural effects.

People are the Face of the Land: the Story of Te Uru Taumatua

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For New Zealand’s Tūhoe Māori people, a spectularly sustainable building serves as the first tribal headquarters in 1.5 centuries. Here, nature, custom and community come to flourish in harmony. When a crowd of 3,000 people moved as one to the sound of Tūhoe Māori warriors calling them, you could have mistaken it for a scene in a movie.

Eating Local Food in Bristol: From Farm to Table

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Getting your produce onto the plate of the end consumer is one of the key challenges for local food producers, who often face obstacles in the form of unpredictable orders and time consuming packaging and deliveries. One of the strengths of the food scene in Bristol is the variety of different routes available to producers; from innovative direct to customer models to businesses with a firm commitment to sourcing locally, Bristol is a city that is working hard to get its local food to the customer.

Louisiana’s Floating Pipeline Protest Camp Prepares to take on ‘The Black Snake’

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Bayou LaFourche also happens to lie along a route of great interest to Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. The company wants to lay pipe a few feet under the mud as part of the proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline. Activists call the Bayou Bridge Pipeline the “tail end of the black snake” — the Dakota Access Pipeline is the head. Bayou Bridge would funnel 480,000 barrels of oil per day over the final 162 miles to refineries in St. James. On the way, it would pass through eight watersheds and many fragile wetlands.

Before the Wind Consumes us

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I think the reason people are unwilling to change their lifestyle to counter climate change is because of an inability to recognize our dependence on the culture we’ve created. Like an anteater that evolved a specialized nose making them totally dependent on eating ants (thus as the ants go so goes the anteater), humans have become adept at using and depending on fossil fuels and technology.

Why Hurricanes Harvey and Irma won’t Lead to Action on Climate Change

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It’s not easy to hold the nation’s attention for long, but three solid weeks of record smashing hurricanes directly affecting multiple states and at least 20 million people will do it. Clustered disasters hold our attention in ways that singular events cannot – they open our minds to the possibility that these aren’t just accidents or natural phenomena to be painfully endured.