Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sophie Bloemen The commons is an emerging paradigm in Europe embracing co-creation, stewardship, and social and ecological sustainability. Commons perspectives could help to reinvigorate Europe with constructive and concrete policy implications on many terrains.
This summer, get outside, roll up your sleeves, and take a stand for public lands. Here are 5 ways to do this. Use them or lose them!
Sustainable agriculture needs to be integrated throughout the entire learning system if all our future farmers are to embrace the sustainability agenda. Young people are a sponge for information and what they are told now will impact on how they farm in the future.
A new world based on community and collaboration is closer than you think. We can steward resources together, in fact, millions of people are doing just that. And not just in the history books. This week, from Kingston, NY, author and activist David Bollier, Co Founder of the Commons Strategy Group, explains what it means to Think Like A Commoner.
We now have to take into account that depletion means that, at well heads around the world, the energy to produce energy is increasing. It takes energy to prospect for oil and gas and if the wells are smaller and more difficult to tap because, for example, they are out at sea under a huge amount of rock. Then it will take more energy to get the oil out in the first place.
Our core assumptions about what it means to be human, how we relate to the universe and how it relates to us, are well past their pull date; they no longer yield useful insights into the problems that beset us today. It’s because of that failure that the paradigm itself is becoming visible to us at last. We could talk about that paradigm in a great many ways, but I’m going to suggest a deliberately edgy label for it: anthropolatry, the worship of humanity as a god.
Craftivism was coined in 2003 by Betsy Greer. I always say Craftivism is like punk music. Under that punk umbrella label you’ve got the Talking Heads, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and they all sound completely different but they’re all under that banner. So you could say Craftivism is anything that links craft with activism.
In a sharing vision of a local renewable energy system, many households will generate their own renewable energy (as in solar photovoltaic or solar thermal systems on their rooftops), but many more, for whom this is not an option, will share in the ownership and operation of off-site renewable energy generation infrastructure such as wind turbines.
Amid a natural gas boom, could U.S. activists ever dream of a national ban on fracking? If it seems impossible, they should look to the south for inspiration. On March 29, the small Central American nation of El Salvador passed a total ban on metal mining.
A better understanding of the pathways to positive change will help show, even more, what urban food policy can do to change the food system and where it can have the most impact.
People soon realized it was not enough to just say no. They needed to offer a better alternative and say yes to something. So the Germans demanded what has since become known as energy democracy: the right to make your own energy.
Walking advocates once focused primarily on physical health —spurred by mounting evidence that physical activity is key to preventing disease—but now are stepping up to promote social, economic and community health. Their ultimate goal is to transform towns and neighborhoods across America into better places for everyone to live.
