The Land of Lies
I’ve not often been called an optimist, but I am strangely hopeful that this time we will found our communities in the solid grounding of this planet, in the reality of shared experience, and in the truth of who we are.
Act: Inspiration
What Could Possibly Go Right?: Episode 65 Paul Hawken
Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and a renowned lecturer who has keynoted conferences and led workshops on the impact of commerce upon the environment. He addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Growing community in vacant Chicago lots
Community gardens like Harambee are becoming increasingly popular, with more than 29,000 garden plots in city parks in the 100 largest U.S. cities.
A radical land occupation in Brazil shows how to reimagine our societies for the better
Resistance will always face repression if it is strong and poses a real challenge to the elites and the privileged. It will need resources and a community to survive and endure.
Business as Usual is a Failure for our Climate Emergency
Assemblies can be the way to break the business as usual logjam that is paralysing effective action. For that, they need to be given the time and range of expert input to be able to arrive at their own understanding of the level of the emergency, and the transformations needed to address it.
Farms for Tomorrow Podcast: Kathy Sample & Bill Brinkerhoff, Argus Farm Stop
Argus Farm Stop opened in August of 2014 with a mission to grow the local agricultural economy by creating a year-round market for locally produced foods. Since then, Argus has returned over $10 million in sales revenue to local producers while building a loyal community following.
Attending to the rebirth of a culture
So how can we attend to this great change that is happening among us? How can we make the birth as painless as possible? How can we ensure that the culture that results is truly healthy?
Democracy Rising 9: Facilitating Democratic Conversations, Part 1
What forms of self-governance will enhance our efforts to create resilient local communities?
The place and (place-ness) of Occupy, ten years on
[T}he legacy of Occupy Wall Street was “something that touches our deepest spiritual yearning,” in a very un-Walzerian sense; “its practice says: ‘We will no longer live in hatred and competition. We will live in love and community.'”
My Manifesto: Toward a Politics for Life
The most recent events tell us that the time has come for us to assume our responsibility as human beings who share a common destiny, and that implies the end of ideologies, not one or the other, but all of them, those of the left, center and right, and their replacement by the eco-political, generic and planetary consciousness of women and men.
Bringing Degrowth and Commoning to Fashion
Through the organization Fashion Act Now, a growing band of dissident fashionistas want to make the clothing industry more ecologically responsible, relocalized, and culturally in sync with this moment in history, especially with respect to climate change, economic justice, and decolonialization.
The importance of reminding people to Look Up (over and over and over again)
Humanity, with its competing interests, its cultural myopia, its dominant economic philosophy that puts growth above all, will be hard to redirect from self-destruction—hopefully not in the case of a simple asteroid strike, but certainly in a multi-faceted slow acting, status-quo-disrupting crisis like ecological overshoot.
