Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Meghan Williams It’s not rare for people to be left behind by profit-driven corporations, or even overlooked by underfunded and understaffed government agencies. In that case, we must learn to turn to each other. And in preparation for such times, we must bolster community resilience through initiatives like community gardens, tool libraries, and the like.
As large systems strain and loosen, smaller systems already begin to form. People create pockets of care, work, learning and shelter that operate by different rules. These efforts remain partial, local and imperfect, yet they matter.
Beyond its immediate content, the Empathy Project ricochets out echoes and ripples, negotiating both structures and surfaces: tracing the lines of a whole, out of kilter, system of interconnected, interdependent components that needs realignment, and “empathy” is probably the best way forward.
“The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us … [manifesting] today as an intersection of money, power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits … and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world.”
The Pacific Northwest (PNW) region is typically defined to include Oregon and Washington, and British Columbia (Canada) and the northernmost section of California are often included, as well. The Pacific Northwest “bioregion”—an area defined by shared natural characteristics, such as watersheds, topography, geography, climate, or ecosystems, rather than by arbitrary human borders—also can be interpreted in different ways.
Perhaps the main problem for capitalism and the problem with capitalism is that it is dependent on the same free “services” from nature and humans as it destroys?
Smith gambled that strong oil prices would deliver her chaos-making government a safe ride on the roller-coaster. But if Trump’s Venezuela gambit succeeds, Smith’s increasingly unpopular government could find itself flying off the track all together.
If we treat dissensus not as division but as an invitation into shared learning, then AI’s arrival could support a vital pedagogical turn: away from assessing mastery of sanctioned truths, and toward the integration of difficult lessons in this era of consequence.
Every inhale signifies participation, every exhale, accountability. Maybe this is the true measure of enough: letting the breath of life circulate freely through all that exists.
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.
