Money Can’t (and Shouldn’t) Buy Happiness: Producers, Consumers, and the Consumptive Mindset

Copiously, ludicrously, we deface our lands, displace our brother hawks and sister mice, and destroy our links to the ecological communities that fabric our very being. Life is consumption, and, I suppose, consumption is life. But we have strayed so far from whence we came.

Where Next for the New Economy Movement?

The question we explored was simple: “how do we get to a new economy?” How exactly do we move forward with sophistication and seriousness to build the power necessary to take on the existing system? As Makani Themba, one of the conference’s plenary speakers put it, “It’s not just about how we build a new, parallel economy—it’s also about how we starve the beast which is the current one.”

Look and See; Listen and Hear: Wendell Berry and the Contradictions of our Climate

Although certainly embraced more frequently and ardently by liberals than by what passes for a conservative today, Wendell Berry is clearly a religious rather than Liberal thinker, praising the unified and relentless in his criticism of the fragmented. 

How Farms can Help Improve the Lives of Disadvantaged Young People

On social farms, health, social or specialist educational care services for vulnerable people are delivered through structured programmes of farming-related activities. Social farming is established in numerous European countries. Norway currently operates 1,100 social farms, compared to 240 in the UK.

Catastrophe, Technology, Limits, and Localism

Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet, published earlier this year, is a fabulous book. Not a perfect book; sometimes, in order to bulk up this two-pronged thesis, he will throw in supplementary material that threatens to bog down his central investigation. But that investigation comes through loud and clear all the same, and it is one worth looking at closely.

Care is at the Heart

I see joyful militancy as both a practice and an articulation – ideally both together. As a practice it does not always come with an articulation of the experience, and then there are those groups and movements that have the explicit language of care and love, but do not always practice it.