Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Abalimi Bezekhaya is an organization focused on using urban agriculture to develop and improve food insecure communities in and around Cape Town, South Africa. Operating for more than 30 years, the organization has helped dozens of communities improve their health and lifestyles.
With Donald Trump’s election and the rising perils of war, climate upheaval, accelerating inequality, and civil unrest, some of the richest people in the United States are making escape plans.
Although food spoils much faster in a tropical climate, the Vietnamese will often store it without refrigeration, and instead take advantage of controlled decay. Vietnam’s decentralised food system has low energy inputs and reduced food waste, giving us a glimpse of what an alternative food system might look like.
According to the Repair Café Foundation, there are now more than 950 repair cafés worldwide with 18 in the UK. Repair cafés offer individuals with ‘fixing’ expertise to come together to perform a useful service for their community, while enjoying the camaraderie of friends and neighbors.
Public, media and corporate awareness of the need to tackle food waste appears to be higher than ever, but evidence suggests that despite this growing awareness, efforts to cut household food waste in the UK seem to have stalled.
Co-operatives have been described as freshwater fish in a saltwater environment. In the 1930s, the co-operative sector in many countries was very powerful but it was destroyed by fascist and communist regimes. What was it that the authoritarians found so threatening in co-operation?
This is where buy local is different from Buy America. Buying locally-produced products that are sold in locally-owned stores is a key strategy for building local wealth. Every dollar spent locally is a dollar of wealth retained in the community. The alternative is for that wealth to leak into other communities while making the local community poorer. This is the community expression of the saying, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
As a solution to the present situation, a growing number of people in the world are proposing “communalism”: the usurpation of capitalism, the state, and social hierarchy by the way of town, village, and neighborhood assemblies and federations. Communalism is a living idea, one that builds upon a rich legacy of political history and social movements.
It is likely that most thoughtful people today experience future possibilities as fearful. All the objective signs – political, social, ecological – appear largely negative. It seems clear that a crash or major rupture of our economic model is coming as well as an abrupt shift in our climate stability. Efforts at reform have proven to be too weak and inadequate. Journey to Earthland positions itself right in the midst of this foreboding.
Numerous restaurants across the country have joined a Sanctuary Restaurants Movement to offer safe and tolerant spaces to restaurant workers, employers, and consumers that face hate and harassment in the restaurant industry.
Nor is there any need for politics to be something inflicted on us, at great cost to our souls, by tyrannical, abstract systems. Instead it should and could be something we recapture from its lofty conceptual realms, disarm, bring down to earth, and revive — in the process remaking ourselves and our world.
Ashland has an abundance of “social inventors” — people who see a need in the community and are able to rally others to take part in it, all to make life better, more fun and more hopeful. In a new book called “Better Ways to Live,” Ashlander Craig K. Comstock profiles a raft of social inventions, many which influence the Ashland community…
