Act: Inspiration

The Great Divide – building bridges between cities and their rural hinterlands

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Don’t get me wrong, there are rural investments and there are rural initiatives, but they tend to be sectoral – you can run a project for older people or younger people or business people or just about any other ‘people’ you care to mention. But it’s a hard sell to persuade those holding the purse strings that rural areas deserve an integrated, holistic approach, an approach based on geographies rather than targeted bits of the population. This piecemeal approach to rural development gradually undermines the sustainability of rural geographies and chips away at our understanding of geographical identity and belonging. As a result of this, power and money and skills and resources have haemorrhaged away from rural communities over the decades, to be only partly replaced by the energies and aesthetic of a legion of culturally creative incomers.

The economy: Under new ownership

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Something is dying in our time. As the nation struggles to recover from unsustainable personal and national debt, stagnant wages, the damages wrought by climate change, and more, a whole way of life is drawing to a close. It began with railroads and steam engines at the dawn of the Industrial Age, and over two centuries has swelled into a corporation-dominated system marked today by vast wealth inequity and bloated carbon emissions. That economy is today proving fundamentally unsustainable. We’re hitting twin limits, ecological and financial. We’re experiencing both ecological and financial overshoot.

Can we cooperate our way out of trouble? A review of ‘The Resilience Imperative’

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I spent many years as a corporate lawyer, employed by large corporations to fly around the world and do deals. That is, until I realised that the businesses I worked for, although admirable in many ways, weren’t properly taking into account their impact on people and planet. They were (very efficiently) running in the wrong direction. So ten years ago I left the corporate world and went looking for better models for business, working with charities, fair trade businesses and cooperatives. I soon realised that none of the old models are really serving us any more. Corporations place too much emphasis on shareholders’ needs, while cooperatives place too much emphasis on the collective needs of their community, and neither properly take into account the needs of individuals, of society as a whole or the ecological needs of the planet. What is required, I concluded, is a fundamental re-think our basic organising models for business and to adopt structures that are scaleable and designed to serve multiple stakeholders. But what might this look like?

Who owns us? Who owns our future?

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Since the very beginning, who owns the world, its natural assets, and its people’s productivity has been an open question, the goal of dynasties, wars, and tax policies, and the cause of economic, environmental and social inequities. Ownership is not a legalism, nor a settled and sedate arrangement between buyer and seller. The accrual, demise, and contingent nature of ownership rights—who uses the assets, who holds their financial value, debt service, tax and other flows, and who bears the risks that ownership will be unwound—all ride on an economy’s existential question: Who owns us?

Reflections from the European Deep Dive on the Commons

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At a small workshop outside of Paris, France, twenty-two of us – mostly Europeans except for two of us – got together to discuss the economics of the commons from an on-the-ground perspective.  We wanted to identify promising avenues for future research, writing and political action.  This was the third of a series of “Deep Dive” workshops that the Commons Strategies Group, working in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, held in the fall of 2012.  The two other ones were held in Bangkok for Asian commoners, and in Mexico City for Latin American commoners.

Economics – Feb 22

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•Let’s play fantasy economics. Things could really get better
•Re-imagining a world beyond capitalism and communism
•The End of Growth Wouldn’t Be the End of Capitalism
•Nationhood and the multitude: a new form of political subject?
•Nature and the economy: Marxism in an American labyrinth

Refuge

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If the fossil fuel era has been about anything it has been about acting; doing. Whenever we have a problem, we do something. But when are we ever encouraged to reflect? When do we apply a filter to our thoughts that allows us to sort the good ideas from the bad? Rarely. Instead, we’ve papered over these cracks in our thinking with billions of years of concentrated solar energy. Fossil fuels have allowed us to be lazy, turbo-charging all our activity whether or not it is good or useful. But when activity is the sole measure of success, reflection isn’t valued. In political or activist circles, not ‘doing’ is likely to bring an accusation of failing to deal with a problem.

What placemakers can learn from bike/ped advocates

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Mark Plotz is the director of the National Center for Bicycling and Walking, a resident program of the Project for Public Spaces. What that means, in practice, is that Mark is the man who makes Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place happen! Mark’s been poring over the results of last September’s conference in Long Beach, CA, and we recently had the chance to sit down with him when he made the trek up to HQ, to get a sense of how people responded to the new “Pro Place” focus. Mark also offered some teasers about the lead-up to Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place 2014, which will take place in Pittsburgh, PA next fall.

Seattle-area architect leverages the power of the commons to foster stronger neighborhoods

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“I’m trying to bring the neighbor back into the neighborhood,” says Seattle-area architect Ross Chapin, author of a beautiful book called Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating a Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World. Chapin believes design has a strong influence on community connectivity, which is best developed when residents have contact with land held in common, especially in small, four- to twelve-household “pocket neighborhoods.”

Garden as catalyst: the story of Crystal Palace Transition Town’s prize-winning garden

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Here’s a great story about the power of just doing stuff, from Crystal Palace in London. I heard recently that Crystal Palace Transition Town (CPTT) had won the People’s Food Garden Award in the Capital Growth Grow For Gold awards late last year, and I was intrigued to know more about their Westow Park Community Garden and how it came about.

Individual matters

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While environmental advocates urge individuals to reduce their carbon footprint by taking small, simple actions, others argue that individual actions are irrelevant. Do such actions have meaningful impact on the global systems that drive severe weather? Or is policy—corporate and government—the only thing that will make a real difference?