Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Zia Gallina Almost one hundred years later, Smith’s original ideas for planting a two story agriculture remain inspired—planting crop trees on challenging and depleted land. Trees can do most of the heavy work when it comes to feeding the inhabitants of our planet and repairing our land.
Purchasing others’ time, whether by the hour, the day, or the week, can be an important tactic for extracting wealth – especially when asserting control over that time allows for speed-ups in the production of exchange value. But Alyssa Battistoni emphasizes that much wealth depends on natural processes that are difficult if not impossible to speed up. In many such cases capitalism forgoes direct control of labour and finds other ways to extract value.
The thinking is that claiming Life to be “nothing but” matter is not only a staggering simplification, but also reduces the amazingness of life to mere “dead” physics.
This time of trouble calls for a vibrant forest—a woodland brimming with the stalwart oaks, the slender birches, and the bowing willows. We each offer distinctive gifts and dreams to share in our tenacious striving towards a more resilient tomorrow.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate explores the relationship between technology and wealth when viewed through a global biophysical lens.
When the Trump Administration bid on Greenland, or Kalaallit Nunaat, it continued a long history of imperialism in the Arctic island.
The future remains uncertain. The conditions keep shifting. What remains available is the most basic human capacity. Listen. Then place your energy where it returns coherence.
Drawing on historical examples of people power uprisings and on his recent work examining how general strikes and broader “social strikes” are built, in this conversation Brecher reflects on where the U.S. is now, what conditions make such actions possible, and what strategic groundwork is required to turn diffuse outrage into sustained, democratic power.
Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer were each present at many such critical moments of strategic decision-making, and their stances influenced the outcome of the movement as a whole. As Baker put it, “people have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but themselves.”
And while the center burns itself to ash, life goes on. Pretty much as it always has. With bad and good, joy and grief, pain and beauty and such wonder. Give attention to that, to the reality of your life, because that’s the best medicine for bewilderment. And it’s also… just life…
The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is written for ‘engineers (and other humans)’ who want to “transform the built environment industry into a force for good.” Despite coming into the “other human” category here, I found its mental models and some of its thinking devices useful.
We have our greatest democratic possibilities in the communities where we live, and this is where we can begin to turn around the trend to concentrated oligarchic power that threatens democracy as a whole. We must build the future in place.
