Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Wayne Roberts Some people wonder if youthful food movements spreading through cities across the Global North are half-full, half-empty — or maybe even half-baked. The timing for such questioning is perfect. Once a new trend gets over its first flush, people start to judge it as a movement that will be around for a while. That’s when tough questions crop up.
So solidarity economy is a relatively recent term. It is a number of things. It is a global movement to build an economy that works for people and planet and it is an alternative to capitalism. It is also a set or practices that align with solidarity economy principles.
Isn’t there a contradiction between subsidising fossil fuels and meeting Paris climate targets? And, if the subsidies are removed, won’t many people suffer without cheap energy? Though recent analysis shows that the worldwide removal would not magically solve climate change, there are many reasons for reform beyond reducing emissions.
Americans do love their denim, so much so that the average consumer buys four pairs of jeans a year. In China’s Xintang province, a hub for denim, 300 million pairs are made annually. Just as staggering is the brew of toxic chemicals and hundreds of gallons of water it takes to dye and finish one pair of jeans.
Mike Riddell, Director of Hometown Plus, the social business behind the York Place project has helped create a space that acts as both retail and community hub. While not explicitly a ‘permaculture project’ it embodies much of what we would laud as sound permacultural design, embodying both the ethics and principles we endeavour to include in our work.
This is the discovery I make: we are all living liminal lives. Denying this is part of the madness. The only real thing is the liminality of life, the moments when we can inhabit fluidity, accept the threshold. We are just passing through, why should we expect anything other than being between places and times and states of being.
How does our relationship with digital technologies alter our relationship with the future, with the present, and with our imaginations? It’s a question we’ve reflected on in various podcasts and interviews in this series. One of the books that most influenced me on this was Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Present Shock’.
Let’s face it, most of us don’t love the environment most of the time. More often than not, the environment is too cold, too hot, too buggy, too dry or too wet, and we try to keep it safely on the far side of a window or a TV screen. Bicycle travel has a way of breaking us out of that narrow band of comfort.
ather than “regulate” the amount of harm that fracking would inflict on a city that had been cleaning up smog and brownfields for decades following the withdrawal of the steel industry, CELDF offered to draft a local civil rights law that would guarantee certain community rights, including the right to clean air, pure water, the rights of natural ecosystems to flourish, and the right to be free from toxic trespass (poisoning).
While billion dollar development companies eat up affordable housing units throughout the Bay Area, dedicated teams of organizers, nonprofit service providers, community development corporations, and others fight a relentless battle along side and on behalf of those at threat of displacement
After the food price hike in 2007-2008 and in a world that many feel is less secure, there is a renewed interest in food self-sufficiency. Food self-sufficiency is, however, widely critiqued by economists as a misguided approach to food security that places political priorities ahead of economic efficiency.
This article is the latest in the current series looking to the 2018 midterm Congressional elections as an opportunity to broaden support for federal clean energy and climate policies. Today’s installment addresses alternative facts and how membership in an identity group can impact the way people process climate data.
