Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Fablabs, makerspaces, emerging global knowledge commons… These are but some of the outcomes of a growing movement that champions globally-sourced designs for local economic activity. Its core idea is simple: local ownership of the means to produce basic manufactures and services can change our economic paradigm, making our cities self-sufficient and help the planet.
Neither hope nor its cousin joy are to be confused with optimism. The latter tends to be more a quality of temperament than a realistic assessment of prospects. As for the former, well, you have to go looking for them, or even, laboriously, construct them for yourself, at best in the company of other people.
Can the arts stimulate new ways of living in old mining communities like Doncaster? Aided by a small team of part-time staff and many volunteers, a regular print magazine, festivals, events, campaigns, meet-ups and exhibitions have all been spawned from Doncopolitan’s co-working space office on Copley Road.
To prove that the sharing movement is alive and thriving, our dear friends from Shareable have been working on a very ambitious project: a collection of the most exciting and innovative cases of sharing and urban commons now underway around the world.
As much as policy shapes behavior, a mass shift in behavior can push policy and change the world. The shift has to start somewhere — and it starts with the weirdos.
Art can help us cope with the implications of our collective challenges. It can help prepare society for a possibly traumatic future. It can give voice to suffering and loss, helping people deal with life’s inevitable stress. And it can also offer beauty, which can be especially important in hard times.
In dozens of cities, worker-owner cooperatives are establishing new enterprises based on joint decision-making, dignified work conditions and fair pay. Utilizing their existing skills and harnessing new ones, these groups are leveraging their labor on their own terms, with a vision to change their industries and the economic landscape. And in this rising movement, people of color, immigrants and women are leading the way.
So, this has and continues to be an interesting experiment. I would not recommend writing your emissions on your face. But writing them somewhere else, a little more discreet, a little more demure….? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.
To best address the steps toward resilience the Transition Movement has made in the United States over the last ten years, it seems sensible to start with a project that has contributed roughly a quarter-million pounds of organic fruits and vegetables to food insecure families since its inception in 2010
In my own journey what I found out was that most people think education is a solution going forward for the world, and to deal with the different crises on the planet, and I found that the education system, the current one, is actually part of the problem. Not only is it irrelevant, but it also is actually creating, reproducing, the same sicknesses you have in the planet.
In Jackson Rising, Akuno helps chronicle the history, present and future of one of the most dynamic yet under-documented experiments in radical social transformation taking place in the United States.
Lyndsey Antanitis is the Veteran Farmer Program Coordinator at the Rodale Institute, an independent research institute for organic farming. She is a farmer, healthcare professional, and veteran with a passion for helping others and providing opportunities within organic agriculture.
