Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin is our prince’s name, and he eventually became a renowned scientist who advanced the understanding of the history of glaciers, an historian of revolutionary movements, foremost theoretician of anarchism, and, because of his lifelong burning desire to do something to help the plight of the common man, something of a revolutionary himself.
Since February 2010, the crisis in Greece is being addressed with austerity measures as prescribed by the troika of EU, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund. At present, the government is negotiating yet more austerity, even if past measures failed to produce the desired results. On the contrary: their consequences are already devastating.
Can you create a Transition Town in the Republican South? Without dwelling on the contentious issues of climate change or Peak Oil? Albert Bates shows us how to move anyone toward localization and food security.
As the corruption of the market/state duopoly has deepened, our very language for identifying problems and imagining solutions has been compromised. The snares and deceptions embedded in our prevailing political language go very deep. Such dualisms as “public” and “private,” and “state” and “market,” and “nature and culture,” for example, are taken as self-evident.
At the 2012 Degrowth conference in Venice one of the highlights for me was the talk by Arturo Escobar. He is the author of Encountering Development and Territories of Difference, among others. His talk looked at how Transition might look in the context of the Global South, and held many fascinating insights. Here is the interview I did with him, first as an audio file, and below as a transcript.
Since Babylon’s U.S. region is currently in the grip of its periodic voting hysteria, many pundits, apologists and propagandists for Wall Street’s Lefty/Righty sockpuppets assure us that we absolutely must vote. They even go as far as asserting, as Rebecca Solnit does, that “if you want to be political you have to pay attention to electoral politics and maybe even work with it.” Gasp. You can’t be political without turning into an Obamabot or a Romney dawg (the Noz Pinscher)?! What a ghastly world some people inhabit, and by choice, no less…
The Baltic Sea is just one example of a challenge that crops up everywhere. Think about the food systems of a city; the restoration of a river; the management of informal waste economies; or the care of older people. In all such contexts, a variety of different actors and stakeholders — formal and informal, big and small — need to to work together.
Smart grids, electric cars and Power From The People.
How would the ordinary middle-class consumer – I should say middle-class citizen – deal with a lifestyle of radical simplicity? By radical simplicity I essentially mean a very low but biophysically sufficient material standard of living, a form of life that will be described in more detail below. In this essay I want to suggest that radical simplicity would not be as bad as it might first seem, provided we were ready for it and wisely negotiated its arrival, both as individuals and as communities.
It has become increasingly clear that we are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by an archaic order of centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, presided over by a state committed to planet-destroying economic growth, people around the world are searching for alternatives.
The High Pamir and Pamir-Alai mountains of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan form one of the world’s most remote and beautiful landscapes. But with this isolation and dramatic scenery are extreme climate and socio-economic marginalization that results in communities here being some of the poorest in Central Asia…Farmers in this region rarely have enough money to risk investing in new crops that might improve their economic situation. But the ingenuity of some local farmers who are interested in expanding beyond the confines of traditional staple crops, is leading an agricultural transition towards micro-innovation.
Last year I visited Montreal to attend the Ecocity World Summit, a biannual gathering of visionaries from around the globe committed to creating cities where people live in mutually enriching relationship with each other and with the Earth. Looking at cities as living breathing organisms, with all their residents human and non-human forming an intricate web of interdependence, the very idea of an ecocity is rooted in a sharing principle, where citizens understand not only the physical value of making the most of our natural resources, but the cultural, spiritual, ecological, and ultimately, economic value inherent in building networks and communities.
