Lean Logic and Surviving the Future: Review
These comments are not those of an opponent but of a dialogue partner. Lean Logic offers the reader the chance to learn, to reflect and to respond. There could be no greater gift bequeathed to us.
Society featured
Reinventing Poor Cities at Scale
Flint, MI presents a very compelling story. A city full of poor, disadvantaged people from which the affluent have fled. An economy in systematic decline where jobs have been shipped out and factories boarded up. Neighborhoods without basic investment to keep things livable. And, the acute, high profile tragedy of a water system delivering lead poisoning to its children. How can we not act?
A Power Zone Manifesto
What we are about to undertake is to write a prescription. Essentially, over the next 10 or 12 weeks, we are going to write a book comprised of a string of these blog posts, chapter by chapter.
Neoliberals know the price of everything and the value of nothing
My father likes to say that some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The same could be said of the neoliberals of the world, who–in case you missed my previous piece–are now transcendent in most policy circles across the world.
Just Enough Is Plenty: Review
Samuel Alexander has written an excellent introduction to Thoreau’s works. Just Enough Is Plenty: Thoreau’s Alternative Economics not only summarises Thoreau’s ideas, it is also a pithy statement of Alexander’s work itself…
The Embarrassments of Chronocentrism
It’s a curious thing, this attempt of mine to make sense of the future by understanding what’s happened in the past. One of the most curious things about it, at least to me, is the passion with which so many people insist that this isn’t an option at all.
After Trump 1: Getting Urbanists and Localists Together
So, as one small effort to try to organize my thoughts about politics in the Trump era, let me see if I can make the case for why urbanism should, and usually does, comport with localism, and thus why urban-sympathetic conservatives and radical and democratic localists, as we all face 2017, have much in common.
Squeezing Oil Out of Your Travel (Make Your Life Less Oily in 2017, Part 2)
Now that you have an understanding of your oil consumption, let’s say we don’t want to support the rather nasty activities that oil production necessitates or that oil profits make possible. What to do?
Standing Rock and the Return of the Nonviolent Campaign
Nonviolent campaigns are often dramatic and catch the attention of millions—think of Standing Rock water protectors resolute in the face of a brutal police force. All the more puzzling that the concept of a “nonviolent campaign” is little known and often ignored when people talk about how to mobilize power, for example, to prevent Donald Trump from erasing gains made in addressing climate change.
To confront power, one must first name it: Neoliberalism and the sustainability crisis
If you care about sustainability, if you care about social stability, if you care about the poor, the power you are up against is the neoliberal ideology as expressed on both the right and the left. If you don’t understand that, then you will end up shadow boxing against a shadowy and ill-defined opponent.
Dominica in Transition?
The island state of Dominica (absolutely NOT the Dominican Republic!) is unique, constantly confounding my expectations. It is a tropical Caribbean island, but not a typical Caribbean island. It is hot and wet, mountainous, with small rocky beaches, few tourists, and a fiercely independent spirit in a part of the world dominated by their powerful neighbour to the North. I was invited by WEF, the Waitukubuli Ecological Foundation, to visit and help them explore Transition as a possible way for this island.
The Moral and Ethical Weight of Voluntary Simplicity: A Philosophical Review
A vast and growing body of scientific literature is impressing upon us that human economic activity is degrading planetary ecosystems in ways that are unsustainable. Taken as a whole, we are overconsuming Earth’s resources, destabilising the climate, and decimating biodiversity…
