Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“Compassion is our new currency,” was the message scrawled on a pizza-box lid at Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan — held by a pensive-looking young man in Jeremy Ayers’s great photo portrait. But what can you buy with compassion?
Quite a lot, it turns out, including a global movement, and even pizza, which can arrive at that movement’s campground as a gift of solidarity.
There are many possible futures out there. I think that what I see is a huge amount of resources in our economy, both in terms of capital equipment, intellectual effort, finance, being directed towards the growth agenda. A different agenda, a different ambition for our society and our economy away from the pursuit of growth, would automatically free up, at least in principle, a lot of these resources.
Where between the situation we have now, with species becoming extinct but there still being enough green land to enable breathing, and the future development paradise where every scrap of field and hill is covered with concrete and tarmac, is development supposed to stop? Assuming that future generations will still need air to breathe, there must be a boundary, so how do we know that we have not already reached it? And if not, when will we know we are there?
The leading tagline of the Occupy Wall Street movement reads: “Protest for World Revolution.” This is an ambitious claim, to be sure. And in most respects it seems to ring quite true: the movement has successfully taken root not only in cities and towns throughout the United States but also in major urban centers around the world…But the Occupy movement has been notably absent outside of North America and Europe….What accounts for the failure of Occupy to capture the imagination of the global South, which comprises precisely the people whose lives have been most brutally affected by the recent global financial crisis? And in what sense can Occupy claim to be a world revolution if it leaves out – and in some cases even alienates – the vast, non-white majority of humanity?
Thanks to your support, we have just completed "You Are Here: The Oil Journey." This is a customizable presentation *you* can use to tell your own journey and to invite new people to join the larger conversation. This animated slide show delivers PCI’s core message honestly, but in a compassionate way that…well, just watch it and see for yourself.
Then I returned and spoke again to the land. I said, “Tell me, what do the people of the machines want?” And I waited a very long time in silence. And when the land finally spoke it said this…
– Thank You Anarchists
– Occupy the North (North England)
– With the Occupy Seattle Encampment Closed, Where Do They Go Now?
– Occupy Highlights Authoritarian Behavior by Police
Henry Red Cloud’s address is 1001 Solar Warrior Road on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. But the road sign hasn’t arrived. A windmill towering over the cottonwoods in the draw of White Clay Creek marks the location of Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center and his “Solar Warrior Community.”
I had the privilege recently of speaking with Peter Victor, Professor in Environmental Studies at York University and author of “Managing without growth”. At a time when the obsession with making our economies grow again is close to hysteria, Peter’s work asks the question as to whether economic growth is the best way to achieve what we want from a society; employment, happiness, good public services, increased equality and so on, and concludes we could have an economy that isn’t growing, but which is actually better at those things.
Originated by the rising concerns expressed by many International Land Coalition (ILC) members in 2008, the Commercial Pressures on Land research project is intended to go beyond the large-scale land acquisitions phenomenon, focussing on the wider set of converging drivers for investment interest in land, such as rising food consumption and predicted long-term food prices rises; demand for feedstock for agrofuels; increasing commodity prices; carbon-trading mechanisms such as REDD; and rent seeking and speculation practices on land by recontextualising them within longer term trends.
We need to break the intellectual spell under which we live. The last few decades have been dominated by the premise that privatizing all economic resources will produce endless riches. Which was kind of true, except that the riches went to only a few people. And in the process they melted the Arctic, as well as dramatically increasing inequality around the world.
Jay Walljasper performs the greatest of services with the book All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons. It is—choose your metaphor—a bracing slap across the face or the kiss that breaks an enchantment. In either case, after reading it, you will be much more alive to the world as it actually is, not as it exists in the sweaty dreams of ideologues and economics professors.
To restore the body requires a readaption to nature. To renovate exhausted soil or soil rendered sterile with pesticides and herbicides and artificial fertilizer requires perseverance. It takes time for the body, revved up by an exotic, highly processed, high-fat Western diet, to reorganise and recover its natural appetite. It takes time to learn how to absorb the kind of food Fukuoka (and several contemporary Western writers on food) are talking about: plenty of plants, not much meat, not much. It takes time to break habits and to let go of the complexity of diets and science in one’s mind and the emotional reactions caused by an unnatural way of life. To engage in a way of being where food is naturally limited by place and time.
