Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tony Buck We may be very smart creatures, but we are still fundamentally animals in a landscape. If modernism ever de-complexifies, as many think it will, like all civilizations in the past, we would be smart to set in place now the infrastructure, skills and knowledge we’ll need to thrive – together.
Let us call to those better angels of our nature which have expanded democracy and justice over these 249 years, working in the places where we live to organize power and forward the ideas that will make a just and sustainable future. That is the ground for a New American Revolution.
How can the necessary relocalisation of food systems be reconciled with a need for exchange based on mutual aid, complementarity, and reciprocity? Can local biodiversity (and its products) support territorially grounded agricultural economies while also nurturing the emergence of spaces for innovation and cooperation across diverse realities?
In a move that threatens to undermine years of progress toward environmental transparency, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has recently decided to withdraw the much-anticipated Green Claims Directive. This directive, which aimed to hold corporations accountable for misleading sustainability claims, was an essential step toward ensuring that companies align their actions with the urgent need to protect our planet.
Before the Industrial Revolution, people added a temporary layer of textile insulation to either the interior or the exterior of a building, depending on the climate and the season. In cold weather, walls, floors, roofs, windows, doors, and furniture were insulated with drapery and carpetry. In hot weather, windows, doors, facades, roofs, courtyards, and streets were shaded by awnings and toldos.
So, when people ask me for one thing they can do to bring about a more positive future, I suggest they seek out stories of real change that are happening right now. I’m talking about local food projects, renewable energy projects and neighbourhoods coming together to create their own solutions.
As Graeber puts it in his lecture on Care and Freedom, “We need to reimagine production and consumption.” We need to produce ‘Care’ not money, and this is really the central ethos of the Care.Home.Farm project.
The archetypal, self-governing citizen in SMPLCTY is the poet-farmer (or poet-carpenter, etc.), who lives simply in a material and energetic sense, contributes to necessary economic production and community governance in non-hierarchical conditions, and who otherwise explores the good life through creative activity and aesthetic experience.
One of the most singular and accomplished commons I’ve ever encountered is Cecosesola, a federation of Venezuelan cooperatives. The remarkable federation artfully manages multiple ventures as commons while deeply immersed within a system of capitalist markets.
From the corridors of the Parliament down to the provincial governments, the shift from fossil fuels to renewables is being framed as both inevitable and immediate. Yet beneath the veneer of urgency and technological optimism lies a deeper tension, who defines this transition, and in whose interest is it unfolding?
If today nostalgia and alienation are among the main forces that keep the status quo intact, thus permeating the desolation of our world by the dominant system, then it is the recreation of the civic community and the genuine public that can help the 99% to self-empower themselves and enact crucial changes.
We must accept that some things can only be experienced and accepted. That they cannot be measured in a ‘hard’ way, and that our attempt to do so will kill the very thing we are trying to save.
