Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When the world-economy stagnates and real unemployment expands considerably, it means that the overall pie is shrinking. The question then becomes who shall bear the burden of the shrinkage – within countries and between countries. The class struggle becomes acute and sooner or later leads to open conflict in the streets.
Craft3 aims to build regional resilience in the Pacific Northwest by focusing investments in rural and urban centers, and in Indian country
Since the birth of the modern peak oil movement in the last years of the 20th century, a great deal of discussion and debate has focused on how to prevent peak oil and its consequences from bringing about the end of the industrial age. That approach has yet to yield much in the way of practical results; as our civilization moves deeper into overshoot, it may be time to consider an alternative approach — and, yes, the Archdruid has one to suggest.
So with the return of spring comes the return of Occupy, which by and large, is probably a good thing. OWS deserves some props for drawing attention to inequity, for bringing radicalism back, and for showing a very complacent corporate and political leadership that the people still have bite in them. Generally speaking I approve of Occupy.
One of the things I don’t approve of, however, catchy as the framing is, is the “1% vs. 99%” rhetoric. The reason I don’t is that I think it functionally masks really deep inequities — by putting the second percentile together with the 92 percentile, it implies a fundamental symmetry between people who are truly and deeply poor and those who are more than comfortable.
I propose to you today a bold paradigm shift in our economy — away from the futureless economics, away from the casino economics, and away from the cheater economics that run the global economy. We need an economics for the earth, its people, and all the life on this planet.
– The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars
– How to Change the World. The School of Life.
– How to Grow Perennial Vegetable
– 2052: a global forecast for the next forty years
– Visualising Climate Change
– People and Permaculture
– Treasure Islands: tax havens and the men who stole the world
– Local Dollars, Local Sense
– The Fruit Tree Handbook
– The House of Silk
Our capacity to bring about collective change decreases with every passing year – at least the kind of collective change the French people can accept. It is quite possible to simplify the French society, but that means accepting, even embracing, poverty, not something we as a people are likely to do.
Authoritarianism is therefore bound to fail, and become more and more authoritarian with time as, unlike democracy, failure is not something it can accept. Its normal way of dealing with it is not handing power to the other side, but finding somebody to blame.
It’s become common to see activists rejecting, often with quite a bit of heat, the suggestion that they might want to embrace in their own lives the changes they hope to get the rest of the world to adopt. In the twilight years of American empire, that’s a very convenient attitude, but it deprives peak oil and environmental activists of a tool that worked remarkably well the last time it was tried, and closes off avenues for shaping the future that might be better kept open.
“In the first world, we have been fed a false sense of security that is imploding,” says Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, recounting her family’s experience with the militant experiment in collective governance and self-sufficiency. “On Earth Day, our families were a part of manifesting a collective vision for a better way forward—that the land be a community educational center. We have planted strawberries in the children’s garden and feed the chickens with snails that we collect from our own garden. My partner, a cook, brings us food regularly. We are making that vision real.”
In the scant three weeks that Occupy the Farm persisted as a physical occupation, it expanded the tactics, objectives, and vision of the Occupy Movement; it restored the frontlines of a local struggle to get the University of California to respond to community needs rather than corporate interests; it took an issue that is generally only spoken of in the so-called ‘Third World’ – that of food sovereignty and territorial rights – and dropped it into the heart of the urban San Francisco Bay Area; and, it asserted, in the flesh, a demand that many progressives have spoken of in recent years, but few have had sufficient vision, understanding or bravery to manifest: Occupy the Farm was, and is, a bold, largely unprecedented act of reclaiming the Commons in the most immediate sense – taking land out of private speculation and putting it into community use.
The deep, transformative changes sketched in the first half of this manifesto provide a path to America the Possible. But that path is only brought to life when we can combine this vision with the conviction that we will pull together to build the necessary political muscle for real change.
The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history.
