Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Eva Perroni Revitalizing the practice of seed saving is vital for the world’s collective food security. Conservation techniques, such as the creation of seed banks and seed exchanges among farmers, gardeners, and even nations, play an important role in not only preserving ancient, heirloom varieties of important food crops, but also in mitigating against the increasing risks of pests, diseases, and climate change.
In the Vrancea Mountains of Romania, the Eastern Carpathians, people in dozens of villages have used community-based institutions known as obştea to manage forest commons since the sixteenth century.1 The original sense of the word, coming from Slavonic, is “togetherness,” and it underlines the participatory essence of the institution.
On July 27, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux filed a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers for authorizing the construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access pipeline. Just over a year later, the project has been completed and carries crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields to an export terminal in Illinois. The case is still pending, and continues to be the tribe’s last hope to protect its water and land.
Basic income is generally discussed as though it’s something hypothetical that has never existed in the real world, apart for a few recent trials here and there. However, if we define it as unearned income that enables a person to meet their basic needs, we can see that basic income of one kind or other has in fact existed for a fair few people throughout history.
One of the reasons we find it hard to face the facts about collapse and climate change is because there are so few imaginary or real life stories about powerdown. There are plenty of success-through-adversity stories, hero stories, princess stories…And somewhere in the bones of ourselves we know this is a key to our future: we don’t know the outcome of the play. Or whether back up will arrive. We go in anyway. Something is pulling us. It’s time.
Blurring the lines between social movement and local governance, these municipalist experiments organize on the basis of existing municipalities or districts, demanding socially just and ecological solutions to issues that concern the community as a whole.
Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” by policy wonks is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.” Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities…
The implications for the future of the global economy will not be pretty — but if we face up to it, the transition to more sustainable societies will be all the better for facing reality, rather than continuing with our heads in the sand.
Foodies are a fragile thread could alter that trajectory. Gourmet feasts and fads, celebrity chefs and gastronomic tournaments are also standard fare during Peak Excess periods, but the contemporary variety bears a slightly different flavor. We have begun, at the edges of that movement, to compute nutrient density and score it along with flavor and tradition.
We might be annihilating life on earth but this is not something about which we have no choice. In fact, each and every one of us has a choice: we can choose to do nothing, we can wait for (or even lobby) others to act, or we can take powerful action ourselves. But unless you search your heart and make a conscious and deliberate choice to commit yourself to act powerfully, your unconscious choice will effectively be the first one
In the UK, only around 10 per cent of new homes are self-built. But with the housing shortage increasingly acute, many groups and local authorities around the country are looking to community self-build as a potential solution. Can it deliver?
We are in the throes of a transition to a qualitatively new stage of world capitalism. Its essence is the emergence of truly transnational capital, a transnational capitalist class (TCC) made up of the owners and managers of transnational corporations, and transnational state apparatuses through which the TCC attempts to exercise global political authority.
