Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Big changes are underway in Gdansk, Poland today. Since July 2016, some of the city’s most vexing problems have been dealt with calmly – even enjoyably — by a changing, randomly-selected “citizens assembly” made up of approximately 60 ordinary city dwellers, who are brought together and given the authority to take action.
The rivers Paul Parsons reclaims are not wild rivers, they are illusions of wild rivers. Just because a river flows does not mean it is not dead. We can and we should reclaim as much of the earth as we can even if it means dreaming ourselves back to a time very few people can remember, before history was written and stories were on paper.
So what might the commons actually achieve for you if you live in a city? How might you experience the joys of commoning? Check out Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons, a fantastic new book that describes more than 100 case studies and model policies for urban commoning. Researched and published by Shareable, the book is an impressive survey of citizen-led innovations now underway in more than 80 cities in 35 countries.
The Labour Party in the UK, which has a good chance of taking political power at the next election, has been involved in a process of policy development which involves taking up ideas from the commons movement and is focused around the revival of and protection of commons.
We face a species survival-level problem: the need to transition society away from our reliance on climate-changing fossil fuels. Yet national officials not only deny that this is a problem, they are determined to make it harder to solve.
The annual holiday celebrations have arrived and it seems a good time to think about what we are really celebrating. It seems the historic and religious significance of these holidays have been overshadowed by consumerism. Thanksgiving and Christmas have become celebrations of consumption filled with opportunities to eat, drink, and make merry with food and gifts.
Within alternative movements there is much interest in introducing local currencies and they have been central elements in many Transition Towns and other initiatives. Unfortunately I think most of these have been quite misguided, failing to grasp the power a local currency can have, and not likely to make a significant contribution to goals such as town sustainability and resilience.
We are, of course, discussing Saudi Arabia, which has been much in the news lately. This essay will review recent events centered therein and probe their significance. As we will see, the main actors in the drama are an ambitious young Saudi prince, the Trump administration (and its own ambitious young prince), Iran, and Israel (which has a hand in just about everything of significance that happens in the Middle East)—with Lebanon, Qatar, and Yemen as possible staging grounds for the unfolding of further action.
An Alien’s Quest is by far the most cerebral and metaphysical of all of Cary Neeper’s Archives of Varok novels. That isn’t to say that the others have shied away from deep subject matter; they haven’t. It’s just that this one takes the level of philosophical engagement to new heights in its tale of a young woman who leaves her home planet to find the answers to the cosmos.
As Robert Hunziker notes, it may be that “The only question going forward is whether climate change rapidly accelerates as an out of control defiant monster or evolves little by little, in which case the gradualists will be correct, meaning future generations can fight the demons of ecosystem collapse.”
I’m sure there are people out there who are much cleverer than me. What I’ve spent my life trying to do is make these welcome solutions accessible to people. You see – it’s not how clever we are individually, it’s about how effective we are. And ethics sit at the heart of permaculture. Create surplus and share it. So the surpluses we can create might be food… But what if they were happiness, insight or knowledge?
Instead, we’re going to continue to do more of what we’ve been doing. And it’s going to fail. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But eventually the whole big pile of overly leveraged 12,000 mile supply chain debt-soaked tech extravaganza is going to break down and crash of its own dead weight. When we finally get back up and dust ourselves off, we’ll have no choice but to reinvent things.
