Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Marie Venner Unlike the Magna Carta, pertaining to the rights of barons, the Charter of the Forest addressed the rights of common people; it restricted the amount of land that the king could claim for private use and restored common rights to common natural resources.
Rather than pouring public money into projects that put Pennsylvanians’ health and the climate on the line—and that could be doomed to collapse anyway—activists say officials should invest in more sustainable industries.
In a world where crises come in global form – whether it is the climate crisis, economic crisis or another pandemic – the idea that we can simply ship our problems away to some distant outpost is no longer a sustainable belief, if it ever was.
Let’s just get a real basic definition of worker co-ops out there. It’s a business that is democratically owned and controlled by the workers. So it’s a business in which there’s one worker, one share of the business, and one worker, one vote in the business.
If positive feedbacks can be the way we describe how the world unravels and declines, perhaps it’s time we started using them as a way of describing what is so evident in Wellington: that self-reinforcing expansion of confidence and sense of what’s possible that comes from seeing real people creating real change on the ground.
The “tragedy of the commons” is an idea that has so thoroughly seeped into culture and law that it seems normal for people and corporations to own land, water, and even whole ecosystems. But there’s a BIG problem: the “tragedy” part of it has been debunked – it really should be the triumph of the commons.
In certain circles there is an increasing awareness that powerful, sustainable movement work must be more closely attuned to the natural world.
From spiralling fossil fuel prices and volatile supply chains to the worsening climate crisis, there has never been a better time to stop heating homes with natural gas.
In a 1970 poster for the first Earth Day and a cartoon the following year, Walt Kelly’s Pogo offered a hard truth about ecological crises: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
In recent weeks, we commoners have lost three great visionaries. Each spawned robust institutions and movements to carry their visions forward; the continuing vitality of their projects confirm that their spirits remain very much with us. We should pause to reflect on and celebrate their towering contributions.
Demand for renewables and carbon storage could bring wealth to rural Britain — but who will benefit? Time for an update to our Rural Manifesto.
These corals — their lives, their futures — will be decided just a few miles away up on land by people sitting in these convention halls. Richard wants to take the people from that meeting out onto this reef to say, “This is literally what’s at stake here.”
