Building Community

Making space for community

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Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of touring an incredibly vital cultural commons in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island…What may be less appreciated is that AS220 is a self-sustaining creative commons (lower case). While it has all sorts of interactions with the market, government and philanthropy, it is really an unheralded model of a commons for producing and enjoying the arts. It is financially self-sustaining, independently managed, and grassroots-responsive. It is dedicated to art made by and for the people.

Schools in Transition: mapping watersheds

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How connected to your local place do you feel? Do you know where the nearest flow of water is? —I don’t mean down the drain!…Each one of us lives in a watershed and in the future we are likely to need to rely on our local bio-regions (that’s another way of talking about a watershed) and communities much more for the resources we need, and for the social, cultural and community bonds needed to sustain our wellbeing.

A Sustainable Idea: Create State-owned Banks

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At some point personal behavior changes aren’t enough. To become sustainable, we need large-scale investments, which require capital. How can we get access to the financial tools necessary to build a sustainable world? The answer may be through public banking, and one state, North Dakota, points the way.

Time and tides wait for no man

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A century of studies in ecology, and in many other fields from molecules to stars, shows that systems don’t level off for long. They pulse. Apparently the pattern that maximizes power on each scale in the long run is a pulsed consumption of mature structures that resets succession to repeat again. There are many mechanisms, such as epidemic insects eating a forest, regular fires in grasslands, locusts in the desert, volcanic eruptions in geologic succession, oscillating chemical reactions, and exploding stars in the cosmos. Systems that develop pulsing mechanisms prevail.

Zombie politics and the walking dead

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There’s a lot going on in the TV show The Walking Dead that’s worthy of comment, but there’s one aspect of the show that has struck me in particular- that the civilization we’ve built and have come to depend on, could be undermined in short order, returning us quickly to a survivalist state of nature.

The REAL reason conservatives always win

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For Energy Bulletin, this article should be titled, “The REAL Reason Cornucopians Always Win.” The author is a former associate of George Lakoff, and shares his commitment to analyzing framing and political discourse. He writes:

“Progressives need to engage in a values-based strategy that builds trust across the issue silos. We need to focus on building communities of shared identity that bind us together.”

“Why not?” indeed: breathing power into possibilities

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There are endless hideous new “iconic” buildings, massive corporate egos in built form, usually home to just one organisation (such as the hideous gravity-defying monster below, surely a contender for James Howard Kunstler’s “Eyesore of the Month”). But on this day when many are celebrating “24 Hours of Possibility”, how might it be possible to see beyond all that to something that actually nourishes us as individuals, communities and local economies?