Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
With so much evidence pointing to the positive impacts of nature-based activities on improving mental and physical wellbeing, as well as reducing reoffending, it seems like an ideal time to promote gardening and horticulture in all UK prisons.
At the heart of a new climate emergency bill lies a simple idea to cut through Westminster groupthink: a citizens’ assembly.
With ideas like the Green New Deal, or the “Beauty New Deal,” which the Maryland-based Bread and Roses Party has proposed, we should be able to write another volume—2026: A New Agenda for Tomorrow.
Trauma is not conducive to creative thinking. Which brings us to another paradox of these times ― how do we slow down enough so that we can fully utilize our neocortex and listen to our hearts while addressing the real urgency and opportunity of this moment?
Safe to say that these results reflect a clear crisis of representation alongside growing support for ecological and social transition, the defense of the commons, the advance of the feminisation of politics and a significant increase in citizen-led movements with representation on electoral lists.
I started to re-assess my assumption about who this letter would be directed to. When I looked up the dictionary definition – “the capacity or ability to direct or influence the behaviour of others or the course of events” – and I recalled the way the world has changed since 2018, it became clearer where the power really is.
With us, the people.
We would be remiss not to sow true, place-based seed sovereignty in every region and among every culture on this planet, well before a future crisis could uproot us again.
Drawing on Indigenous critiques and practices from the communities we collaborate with in Brazil, Peru, Mexico and Canada, we propose that a decolonial future requires a different mode of (co-) existence that will only be made possible with and through the end of the world as we know it, which is a world that has been built and is maintained by different forms of violence and unsustainability.
Property law as it is today systemically privileges the individual versus the collective, self-serving control over relationships, and exchange value over intrinsic or use value.
Swimming can be re-politicised to create a profusion of swimming commons, that both embed the value of playful public abundance and nurture an ethic of more-than-human care.
Birlik is building new connections between consumers and Small-Scale Fisheries that are accessible to people of all economic backgrounds, while protecting traditional fisher cultures, and providing an alternative vision of just, sustainable, fisheries.
We can choose to believe the future is inescapably set in stone, and thereby make it so; or we can dare to create an opening for a different future, and so give us all a chance.
