Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Environmental movements often frame injustice through race and gender while overlooking the ways class shapes power, exclusion, and whose voices are heard. The result is a climate politics that can alienate the very working-class communities needed to build effective movements.
Open, transparent debate is essential for the cooperative movement. Yet in many co-ops, criticism stays private, and praise goes public, leaving members in the dark, weakening collective decision-making, and enabling bad ideas and bad actors to proliferate.
Elections and protest movements may shift public attention, but systemic change depends on building resilient economies capable of replacing the structures now driving inequality and social fragmentation. The solidarity economy, an evolving network of post-capitalist worker-driven coalitions, is what we need.
From climate collapse to permanent war, our nervous systems are stuck between numbness and panic. A climate scientist argues that surviving the polycrisis means learning to move deliberately between neural states and building smaller, more grounded movements that protect our ability to care without breaking.
I had a letter from a young reader last week, asking what I thought about concrete steps that we might be taking in place of what passes for activism in our present culture.
Labor activists take steps to preserve the documents and strategies they use today, so future organizers will have a practical guide.
MLK teaches us that this kind of systemic change will not come without struggle and personal sacrifice. He asks us each to consider the role we will play.
This impulse toward activism is the sound of love when it roars–when it demands to be heard. The universal is deeply personal.
Having spent a good deal of my life on projects intended to “save the world” (which decidedly does NOT want to be saved!), being confronted with the idea of sharing some of my thoughts about “activism” has provoked a flood of ideas about what to say on such an intriguing subject.
The only thing that makes do-it-yourself fermentation radical is context: our contemporary system of food mass production, which is unsustainable in so many ways.
Starting Monday April 6 I will be leading an online course “Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time” alongside Sterling College’s delightful Philip Ackerman-Leist, joined by Kate, Rob and further stars of The Sequel, as well as other compelling, internationally-renowned guests including Nate Hagens, Helena Norberg-Hodge and Richard Heinberg.
Drama is useful in getting attention for our issues. The Sunrise Movement is only one of the recent movements that grew by seizing the public imagination through drama.
