Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Urban Commons Cookbook seeks to answer such questions as: “Which ingredients of a cooperative community project most help it succeed? What are urban commons and how do they fit into current activist and civil society debates? And what tools and methods do commoners need to strengthen their work?“
The Common Ground Collective’s successes and failures provide some useful insights into how to build new, effective mutual aid projects during this crisis and the next.
I am here to convince you that you may have never fully seen, smelled, heard, tasted, or been touched by a tree. In particular, I humbly submit that you and I have yet to fully fathom what a tree can be . . . or at least, what a mesquite tree can be to us.
The collective project of remaking the world needs to be approached with care for—and active consent from—everyone, because everyone is working together on a project that will be better than anything that currently exists.
One of the few rays of hopeful sunshine in the UK’s currently bleak political landscape is the Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill. In fact, I feel like it is such a vitally important development that I want to use this article to urge you to get behind it, while also offering a rather different perspective on why I feel it matters so much.
Whilst the coronavirus crisis has presented extreme challenges and hardship for residents and organisations in Leeds, Sonja Woodcock hopes that the experience has strengthened the cities’ movement for fairer, sustainable food.
Doughnut Economics is rapidly moving from the fringe to the mainstream. Amsterdam in Holland was recently confirmed as the first ‘Doughnut City’, using the model to underpin its economic development strategy.
Beyond the wants of individuals, are necessities of preservation, shared in common across all cultures – however different these might at first appear – required to conserve the biological integrity of the Earth, and sustain its Earthlings, i.e. all passengers on Spaceship Earth, be they human or other living creatures.
In other words, the inner lives of commoners, as commoners, have direct consequences for the external, material world. They are engaged in a symbiotic dance with living natural systems, a call-and-response conversation with the more-than-human plants and creatures of the forest.
This movement based on the intricate relationship between humanity and nature, forged through friendships with rural farmers and artisans, has tangibly changed cotton agriculture and khadi organizations throughout the country.
And the global task of ecosystem restoration will begin in earnest. Once ideas on how to achieve what’s assumed to be impossible are articulated, that goal is no longer impossible.
Let’s get inspired.
When New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced last month that the state would divest its over $200 billion Common Retirement Fund from more than 20 coal companies, it marked an important milestone for a grassroots campaign that has seen a recent burst of new momentum.
