Farming for the Long Haul: Excerpt
We need farmer- controlled advocacy organizations that are constantly alert to our particular needs as small farmers, engaged in creative adaptation to a changing agricultural reality.
Act: Inspiration
Bringing it All Together in Just. One. Diagram. (Part Four – the Nine Spaces)
Whenever you design and create anything, you deploy one or another conceptual framework. One or another way of framing and making sense of both what you start with, how to go about developing or changing it, where you are heading, and why you are even bothering. No matter if you’re aware of your conceptual framework. It is there.
This City Made Access to Food a Right of Citizenship
To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons.
Let’s Say I Wanted to Escape Climate Change. Where Should I Go?
So you want to escape climate change. That’s a reasonable impulse — climate change rivals nuclear war for the greatest threat to human life in the history of our species’ existence.
300 Million Poets: Amateur Poetry and Our Imminent Reconnection to the Land
How do we live our lives, enmeshed as we are in this increasingly-toxic soup of early-stage civilization collapse, to make the most of today and perhaps bestow upon our children a livable tomorrow? And the answer for me comes down to strengthening relationships.
How London is Setting a New Standard for Market Cities
Why are cities like Barcelona and London investing in markets as critical infrastructure? Because they recognize their ability to strengthen local economies, promote physical health and sustainability, and foster deep social connections in the communities they serve.
Youth – a New Horizon for Climate Communication
This discrepancy begs the question: if carbon emissions keep rising, and our behaviors and lifestyles are not changing, what does that say about our current climate communication initiatives and messengers?
New Generations Meet New Alternatives: the Commons and the Youth Initiative Program
One of the worst effects of capitalist realism is the endless bad-mouthing of alternatives to its toxicity. With this in mind, I’d like to share with you some extraordinary examples of imaginative prototyping exercises towards commons-oriented futures — presented by the very people who will bring them about in the face of darker possibilities.
Helen Marriage on The Sultan’s Elephant and Large Acts of Public Imagination
We took everybody on a journey that said the arts too have their place in the life of a city, and that the city doesn’t just have to be about shopping and traffic, that it’s as important for people collectively to share these moments, moments like this, as it is for them to share or to experience moments in their own life.
A New North American Network Emerges from the Grassroots
Symbiosis, an expanding network of revolutionary organizers and local initiatives, is assembling a confederation of democratic community institutions across North America. This project has been gathering support over the past year and will be launched at a continental congress in Detroit from September 18-22.
Edible Acres at Powell Gardens Feed and Educate Students to Chefs
Approximately 45-minutes drive from Kansas City, Powell Gardens’ Heartland Harvest Garden is America’s largest edible landscape, providing the perfect backdrop for culinary events and education. It’s a place where 60 students capped off a recent visit by helping to make salsa and where a two-year-old CSA is in full swing.
For Love of Place: Reflections of an Agrarian Sage
“Come, friends, let us sit down together. Not in a lecture hall, not in a laboratory, not in a political forum. Here on the banks of the Kentucky River, let us sit down together and see what went on here. What’s going on here now? Why is it the way it is now? What do we want?”
