Building Community

As economic growth fails, how do we live? Part II: Out with the old

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We cannot “set things right” in the sense of restoring things to the way they once were, but we must begin now to adapt to the new realities if we are to reduce suffering and continue an advanced culture. Today’s article, “Out With the Old”, discusses ending seven unsustainable practices.

Identity crisis

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Thirty months into a new life devoid of regular interaction with inmates and honors students, I’m having the sort of identity crisis described by Dmitry Orlov in his excellent book, Reinventing Collapse. According to Orlov, middle-aged men — specifically those aged 45 to 55, nicely bracketing the age I departed the ivory tower (49) and my current age (51) — experienced the highest rate of mortality as the Soviet Union collapsed.

Politics: the third-rail of peak oil analysis

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Just as the growth-based prosperity that our broader culture has liked to attribute to its own good virtues can easily be seen as a product, first, of colonial expansion and then of the unleashed abundance of coal, oil, and natural gas, so also have our chief political beliefs developed under similar circumstances. Individual liberalism, and thus freedom as we have largely known it, are also the products of abundance, often an ill-begotten sort of abundance. Individual liberalism’s main dictum, that you can do whatever you want, up until the point where it does harm to another, made sense as a principle political good only in a world of relatively unlimited space, whether geographical space for migration and resource exploitation, or the less defined space that appeared available to unlimited economic expansion and all the waste and destruction that goes with it.

Light posting during the holiday period

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(Some posting continues … see below and to the right.) We will be taking some time off and posting lightly over the next week between Christmas and New Year.

Regular postings will resume on January 3, 2012. In the meantime, why not enjoy some of the many and varied articles that we have posted during the last year and review some of the highlights of 2011? (Maybe even have a peek at some editor’s picks?)

We’d like to take this chance to say a big thank you for all of your support. If it weren’t for our amazing community of readers, contributors, and supporters, we wouldn’t be here. Happy Holidays!

Reclaiming Christmas, radical homemaker style

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Here’s the bitter truth. I’m my family’s biggest pain in the ass every Christmas. Most radical homemakers probably are….We’re sick of the consumerism, we’re sick of feeling sick after all the crappy food, we’re sick of being pushed around with our kids in an endless stream of command visits and activities, we’re sick of the over-stimulation wrought by endless, ecologically rapacious, quickly-broken toys.

Collapse! The Game: Early draft

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Some of you are aware that I have been working on a cooperative board game called Collapse! designed to help people learn and practice grassroots community-building and preparing locally for the various crises that may precede civilization’s collapse. I’ve finally got a first outline draft of the game, and decided to share it with the world before I go any further. Here are the rules and some images of the game equipment that I have developed thus far, along with a list of what I still have to do to complete the game’s development.

A (very very) brief history of Occupation tactics

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By now, most people know that ‘Occupation’ as a tactic was not invented by 2000 of us at Zuccotti park on September 17.

The occupation is a powerful tactic for a number of reasons: it foregrounds the political issues of everyday life and public space, it produces a positive communitarian solution to the problems it critiques, it is highly visible and struggle is continuous in a way that radicalizes its participants. It has been used throughout history in fights for social justice, peace, and revolution, but now its moment has truly arrived, and there are many more occupations to come.