Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We’ve been working on the Trading Spaces concept for about a year. It’s exciting to be sharing a year’s worth of thinking about innovative ways of increasing collaborative activity on high streets (primary business streets) that doesn’t rely on local residents to be simply consumers –> but partners, makers and social investors as well.
If you visit John Michael Greer’s Amazon Page you are likely to be incredulous when you discover how many books he has written, and you’ll soon discover that collecting all of his articles online is nearly an impossible task. A voracious reader, a prolific writer, a brilliant thinker whose work is intermittently sprinkled with delightful humor, Greer has become one of the most prominent and credible voices among those articulating the collapse of industrial civilization.
Monbiot, Mann, McKibben, various Transitioners and others on what to do if your Transition initiative comes under attack…
When people act to shut down a situation they put an alarm into action. But saying “Occupy Wall Street!” or “Stop the World Bank!” is only an entry point from which deeper solutions must grow in order for transformative change to occur. Manifesting cultural change requires the alarm story we tell our friends to be joined with a solutions story we tell the world of what’s possible. Like the difference between emergency and preventative medicine, sounding alarms without proposing solutions can only partially resolve a chronic issue.
I’m a pedestrian before I’m a driver, a rider, a passenger, a worker, or a shopper. I have to walk through public space to get anywhere, and I prefer walking where there are other people, comfortable sidewalks, and crossable streets. Plants, diverse businesses, and the possibility of running into friends are bonuses. Streets built just for cars undermine all of these elements of great walks and great places.
Social democracy is at an impasse, bereft of an economic programme, but history is on the march. Democratic wealth-holding can give social democrats a new set of economic institutions and political power bases.
This week, Strike Debt tweeted out triumphantly: “It’s a new era. First machine fired up at worker owned factory. #NewEraWindowsandDoors”. For those of us who’ve been following news about the Chicago factory formerly known as Republic Windows and Doors, this was the culmination of years of struggle. It’s an exciting moment, and a victory which hopefully can inspire other factories across the country.
When William Butler Yeats put the phrase I’ve used as the title for this week’s post into the powerful and prescient verses of “The Second Coming,” he had deeper issues in mind than the crisis of power in a declining American empire. Still, the image is anything but irrelevant here; the political evolution of the United States over the last century has concentrated so many of the responsibilities of government in Washington DC that the entire American system is beginning to crack under the strain.
What is it about transition that is so cool? Well partially it’s the attitude. As Isabela Menezes of Transition Granja Viana says in the video, “It’s spreading with such speed primarily because it’s a positive movement.
For all the enthusiasm that “going local” has garnered in recent years, securing local control as a legal entitlement is generally a very different matter. Federal and state law tend to place strict limits on what local communities can do to protect themselves from outside commercial forces.
•Radical activism has a role in speeding up corporate change •Rebuilding optimism of will for effective climate activism•State of Fear •Exporting carbon: Canada’s new asbestos? •A chat with the Sierra Club’s Michael Brune about civil disobedience •The new weapon in the battle for Hastings – the ‘granny tree’
In his excellent book The Breakdown of Nations the maverick economist Leopold Kohr makes several stunning yet, upon reflection, commonsense observations. He points out that small states have tended to be far more culturally productive than large states, that all states go to war but that big states have disproportionately bigger wars that kill many times more people, and that by far the most stable and advantageous form of political organization is a loose confederation of states, each so small that none can dominate the rest. Kohr arrives at his conclusions by a process of reasoning by homology (viz. analogy) by analyzing many of the problems of modernity as different manifestations of the same underlying problem: the problem of excessive scale.
