Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
John Thackara The not-so-secret ingredient in a healthy local food ecology is the embodied presence of those involved. Ecological agriculture cannot be practiced remotely. The only way to manage any landscape sustainably is by living in it long enough, and intimately enough, to learn how to manage it well.
The commons is essentially a parallel economy and social order that quietly affirms that another world is possible. And more: we can build it ourselves, now.
Every so often when reading an obituary of someone, or an awards citation, you realise that you have internalised their work into your thinking without having read it directly. So it was with Donald Shoup, the California transport academic who spent his life working on the problem of urban parking, and who died in February.
This experience of collective construction, centered on energy, has led me to rethink my approach to knowledge and local wisdom, viewing them with greater respect and understanding that they don’t need to make sense to everyone to be valid.
For Baldes, he wants to eventually hunt buffalo like someone would any other wildlife. He’s in the process of buying property to allow buffalo to roam like they did before western expansion.
This is an original book only in the sense that it weaves together other people’s ideas and perspectives in novel ways. I believe the result is something new, but more importantly, I think it offers a necessary counter-narrative to the disenchanted materialism that defines modernity.
The pathway that will be followed and the future that will emerge are of course inherently unknowable, being subject to the chaotic dynamics of complex systems. Put another way, for some possible pathways, there be dragons of the type that Sankofa part one described, whilst down other pathways much more hopeful visions beckon.
The question isn’t “is a river alive?” It is why do we not recognize that a river is alive?
It took the Anthropocene to create an aesthetic of the environmental crisis and self-reflection in the cultural canon. And it sparked a long process of going back over famous works that had been taken for granted as artworks devoid of environmental violence.
Increasing self-provisioning by communities take chunks of our lives out of the market and will at the same time lead to less consumption and less emissions as self-provisioning reduces the time available for salaried work and thereby shrinks the economy and human demands on ecosystems.
Across the world, grounded practices of radical democracy and autonomy demonstrate alternative models of politics, economy, and society—rooted in solidarity, reciprocity, and mutual aid among humans and the more-than-human world.
At the moment Agrihouse’s focus is on building small, cost-effective ponds to capture and store water, creating a replicable model that other small farms can adopt. In doing so, the farm aims to become a hub for sustainable development in Italy, supporting farmers ready to transition toward regenerative and agroecological practices, while providing a real-world example of what ecosystem restoration can look like.
