Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Step by step, I can see little advances in people’s mentalities, or in local politics. For example, recently the Madrid council has received a UN Public Service prize for a collaborative free software platform called Decide Madrid. It is an excellent sign and means that our work and efforts working in the commons are important and can provoke social change.
We live in an age where more than 4 billion people – some 60% of the human population – live on less than what is required for meeting basic human needs. This is a ringing indictment of the global economy by any standard.
History has witnessed a shift in the dominant organizing structure of the economy from hunter-gatherer to agrarian to industrial. The exploitative tendencies of people, including exploitation of both nature and other people, have expanded with these shifts to the point that humanity now faces a crisis of overexploitation.
A much anticipated study into the death toll from Hurricane Maria was released Tuesday. The independent report, commissioned by the governor of Puerto Rico, puts the number of people who died at 2,975 ith low-income communities and elderly men at the highest risk of death.
We must honor our full humanity, especially the parts of ourselves that aren’t in alignment yet with our liberatory values. And part of honoring our humanity means honoring the humanity of others, even that of our enemies and oppressors.
Because most political, social and working life is enclosed, people falsely conclude that our struggle must be to improve those enclosures – not to step gently into the wood. That choice, to weave improvements into the wires, is the course taken by most of the liberal left. It endorses enclosure.
Following an introduction by Gorenflo, in which he summarizes the background of the Sharing Cities movement, states its basic principles and assesses its significance, the book — a collaborative effort by fifteen people — provides over two hundred pages of case studies of local sharing economy projects in dozens of cities.
Mobility in the Netherlands is approached holistically within the urban fabric and in incorporated into how cities are more generally organized.
I understand that by publishing this post I may be giving ammunition to the anti-science crowd. But we can’t just hide in the ivory tower and tell people that science is perfect as it is. We need deep reforms in the way science is done.
To the extent that we are today eroding the carrying capacity on which future generations would otherwise depend, our way of life could be characterized as intergenerational “predation”; to put it crudely, the old are “eating” the young.
My father, eighty-three years old at the time, had spent six decades writing hundreds of articles and twenty-four books articulating an anticapitalist vision of an ecological, democratic, egalitarian society that would eliminate the domination of human by human, and bring humanity into harmony with the natural world, a body of ideas he called “social ecology.”
The following diagram is a hyper-condensed summary of over two years, 80 posts and 70,000 words worth of this blog’s assorted ramblings about permaculture design.
