How to Go the Resistance Distance: Pop-Up Schools for Novice Activists
The new Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership provides in-person training opportunities in activism.
Society featured
On Venice and Curiosity
The word that was in my mind the most as I walked Venice’s narrow streets was ‘curiosity’. No conversation about imagination can happen without an exploration of curiosity, as it is the precursor to imagination. I had travelled to Venice reading Ian Leslie’s book ‘Curiosity: the desire to know and why your future depends on it’, and it turned out to be the perfect reading material, better than any Venice guidebook.
Exploring Abundance as Future in an Intentional Community
In two books, “The Book of Abundance” and “The Book of Community” and in Manifesto, Las Indias outline a model of organizing society that could start with the development of intentional communities. A new model of the economy based on the concept of abundance can be already implemented at the group level.
The Black Isle Permaculture and Art Centre – Direct Democracy, Tattie Bed and Social Justice
By focusing solely on the ‘creating a better world’ part, and refusing, as a movement, to give a narrative of the systemic, structural reasons that led to this situation of near-collapse, I think the permaculture movement is undermining its potential. What I am criticising is the representation, by the permaculture movement and mainstream media, of individual attitudes as the solution.
Rollerblading the Halls of Power
The task of Project Drawdown was not to create new data but to look at the hundred most promising solutions to climate change and rank them, based on cost, readiness, impact and scalability. The results were just published April 18 by Penguin as Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. It is already the number one bestseller and at this writing is sold out on Amazon.
An Occupied Hotel in Greece Models how to Welcome Refugees
While this hotel in Athens, Greece might not offer those conventional services, it provides something far better: Free housing, medical care and meals for hundreds of people who have had to flee their countries.
Review: Retrotopia by John Michael Greer
With his novel Retrotopia, John Michael Greer seeks to challenge the perceptions most people have of technology. His aim is partly to spur awareness about what “technology” actually is, since we’re so used to seeing it equated with electronic gizmos that we tend to have a limited sense of it.
Neoliberal Psychology
All too often, critics speak of neoliberalism as a coercive, external force lying somewhere ‘out there’ in the political landscape. But many of us increasingly and voluntarily govern our lives in a manner mirroring the logic of the market. Is it any wonder, then, that this ideology has become so naturalised, and the alternatives so hard to see?
Rizoma Field School: Practicing Resilience in a Latin American Context
At Rizoma Field School, we hope to educate a network of individuals who can hack, subvert, create, resist and share strategies across contexts. We encourage mutually beneficial partnerships so that we can work together in envisioning and creating a world that can be continually better for all its inhabitants.
Climate Change and the Need for a New Paradigm
We live in times where there seems to be a crisis in just about everything – from the so called financial sector, through the contemporary mass migratory processes, to the severe corrosion of the social fabric.
Fragile
The word that keeps coming to my mind to describe this evening is ‘fragile’. It captures both the strength and the vulnerability of my situation, of the puffins and of the islands themselves.
The Mysticism of Wide Open Eyes
I think it also matters politically, because spirituality, a whole life lived in the way Potter was describing, is of enormous importance in the struggle for social change. This may sound odd given the common image of mystics as people who are removed from the world, but I’m convinced that spiritual experience is one of the keys to the radical transformation of society.
