Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
How do cities concentrate energy and materials spatially? What is the relative emergy basis for modern cities, agrarian towns, and rural spaces? Do city dwellers use more or fewer resources than suburban or rural dwellers? Are big cities more sustainable in descent, as some propose, and how do we maximize empower in the future for our cities?
Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear. That should be a matter of serious immediate concern. What we do right now, or fail to do, will determine what kind of world will greet that event. It is not an attractive prospect if present tendencies persist — not least, because the Great Charter is being shredded before our eyes.
Small town Sebastopol residents in Northern California have been waging a fierce David vs. Goliath struggle against the powerful Chase Bank, CVS Pharmacy, and Armstrong Development for over two years. The implications of this struggle extend beyond this one town, as big business continues to seek to expand its wealth.
In the anger phase of societal unraveling, we must not only be aware of its perils but prepare ourselves with great intention to navigate it. One of the first issues we must grapple with is the reality of trauma. Increasing dissolution of the fabric of the culture is by definition traumatic for those who rely on it for basic necessities, identity, lifestyle, distraction, and sense of well being.
Sometimes conversations get competitive and unpleasant. Everyone is trying to prove they’re right — that they’re smarter than everyone else. This drains our spirit, and we lose our energy to work for change. So we need to remember, in any kind of conversation, that it’s not a contest. Think of it as a barn-raising: You’re helping each other build something.
This is exactly the problem, which is that if you try to preserve this austere vision of equality of opportunity, and you don’t worry about the context of inequality in which it is embedded—a city like New York City, which is a vastly unequal place—the inequality of outcomes, the inequality of resources, the actual amount of inequality is going to subvert and corrupt whatever kind of mechanism you come up with in which you’re trying to preserve equality of opportunity.
So what are cooperatives? They are business enterprises owned and controlled by the very members that they serve. This means that decisions made in cooperatives are usually made by balancing the pursuit of profit, and the needs and interests of members and their communities.
In development that feels strangely like kismet, an encampment of dispossessed young people who wish to opt out of the corporate system and reclaim a basic freedom of working the land, have made their way to Runnymede, a hallowed site in the history of the commons.
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-common pitfalls of challenger movements
-The Story of Change
At what point do we stop worshipping the rulers and behaving like grateful servants, and start to recognise our own beauty and significance? At what point do we stop distrusting and being hostile to our neighbours and our countrymen, and stand by each other, side by side? At what point do we stop believing in the magic spell of money and privilege and realise that the plants we depend on need both light and water? At what point do we realise that everything in our “civilised ” world – our energy, our food, our life – comes directly from the planet? And when we do, when we connect the dots, what are we going to do about it?
I think we inevitably underestimate the bond between biological complexity and cultural complexity…It may seem far-fetched to compare social and agricultural change in Iowa with linguistic and biological correlation in some of Earth’s biodiversity hotspots. But the underlying premise is the same. Biological diversity and cultural diversity go hand in hand.
