Unprecedented Crime: Review
Seldom are missed books truly missed opportunities — but nothing could possibly be worse than missing an opportunity that could have saved your life, and those of your family and friends.
Act: Inspiration
Hang Together or Hang Alone
I’m delighted to introduce Mark Winne’s latest book — Stand Together or Starve Alone: Unity and Chaos in the U.S. Food Movement. I consider it the most important book going on today’s food movements.
How Maine Climate Activists Found their Power Potential by Moving Past One-off Protests
Rob Levin, a Quaker attorney in Portland, Maine, has been concerned about the growing climate crisis for years. Recently, he came to see that using nonviolent direct action could increase his effectiveness on the issue.
Timo Marshall: How To Make Alcohol
In a barter environment, alcohol is a high-demand and easily tradable currency. Should we ever experience a time when our current supply chains are out of commission, those with the knowledge and ability to distill alcohol from local inputs will have a highly valued role in their community.
The Hidden History of Solidarity Economy Visions
It’s tradition that limits our memories to Dr. King, WEB DuBois and a few others, when in actuality there were a plethora of African Americans creating and fighting for a new reality. James Boggs was one of these people.
Brewing, Local Economies and the Imagination
One of the most fascinating craft breweries in the UK can be found nestled in a series of arches beneath a railway bridge in Bermondsey in London. For the last 9 years, The Kernel, under the guidance of its founder Evin O’Riordan, have pioneered not just amazing and distinctive beers, but also an approach rooted in connection to place, to a different way of doing business.
Agriculture and Autonomy in the Middle East
In Rojava, a region in Syria also known as North Kurdistan, a groundbreaking experiment in communal living, social justice, and ecological vitality is taking place.
We Have what it Takes to Meet the Crisis of our Democracy
In fending off despair and effectively taking on democracy’s degradation, one insight has helped us a lot: that it’s not the magnitude of a challenge that crushes the human spirit; rather, it’s a sense of futility that does us in. Homo sapiens evolved, after all, as doers and problem solvers.
Talking Climate, Taking Action – a Quest for Belonging
In this, my final reflections on the value, science and art of talking climate change and energy issues, I lift this to you: do this together. Do this in community. Traverse the valleys, the slopes, the bogs and the boulderfields, the heights of this quest in company – and then share the stories that roll from it.
Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy
It is in the midst of these devastating new realities that Lynne Segal’s book Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy has appeared on the literary scene. In her new book, Segal adamantly refuses despair.
Dark Kitchen: Making Friends with Microbes
For thousands of years the arts of fermentation have transformed and preserved raw food in cultures across the world. Yet even though some of our strongest and most loved flavours – coffee, chocolate, cheese, salami, olives, as well as soy, miso and tempeh, wine and beer – are still alchemised via the life-death-life process of bacteria and yeasts, live, fizzing vegetables can be a challenge.
Why ‘Urban Villages’ are on the Rise around the World
Among those who focus on sharing and the commons, an urban village is a term that refers to a collaborative way of life — a relatively small, place-based urban community where people cooperate to meet one another’s many needs, be they residential, economic, governmental, or social. In the process, they wind up transforming their own experience of that community.
