Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The Occupy movement, unlike the peak oil/climate/Transition movement (?) is a bottom-up not a top-down approach. That appeals to the younger people and many of the older ones as well. What they are doing is not coming in the form of ‘delivered wisdom’ from the ‘experts in the field’ with their laundry list of what we ‘must’ do.
Ten thousand years ago, ancestors of today’s Coquille Indians lived along the southern Oregon coast from Coos Bay to Cape Blanco and along the inland valleys of the Coquille River drainage. A common misconception among European Americans is that Indians lived passively within their environment, “at one with nature.” On the contrary, aboriginal peoples actively managed their landscape for their own objectives, using the technologies available to them.
I love Buy Nothing Day. I’ve celebrated it since it was first announced twenty years ago by the same band of merry activists who launched the Occupy Wall Street movement.
– The Importance of Creative Protest
– Mike Davis: Ten Immodest Commandments
– The Revolution Is Love – video by Charles Eisenstein (author of “Sacred Economics”)
– Jan Lundberg: How bad or hopeful is our situation as a culture and species?
For college graduates in their 20’s or 30’s facing few job prospects and excessive student debt, graduate school can seem a promising way to sit out the recession. It’s far from a sure bet, though: there’s no guarantee of future employment, it only adds to the mounting debt post-undergrads face, and it consumes time and resources that could be better devoted to making things. But there are alternatives. Don’t Go Back To School is a project by author, NYU instructor, and Yale graduate school dropout Kio Stark exploring other ways to facilitate post-undergrad learning.
When civil society sleeps, we’re just a bunch of individuals absorbed in our private lives. When we awaken, on campgrounds or elsewhere, when we come together in public and find our power, the authorities are terrified.
Sharon Kaiser, a supervisor and worker-owner at Evergreen Laundry, reports that her friends and family are eager to hear about what is happening inside Evergreen. “They want to know what they can do to be part of this,” she says. “It is a very positive thing for the community.” This expressed longing to participate in Evergreen’s model of sustainable wealth-building should not be underestimated. As Howard describes it, Evergreen is unleashing a powerful force: “the energy of people to become actors in history in their own lifetimes.”
After my talk in Norwich last week, I met a local authority emergency planner, who said that he had found the talk, and the Transition take on resilience, very illuminating. He pointed me in the direction of the latest “Strategic National Framework on Community Resilience”, the latest “national statement for how individual and community resilience can work”, published by the Cabinet Office in March of this year. It is a fascinating document, and is indeed the first official government document on community resilience that refers explicitly to the Transition movement, and as such deserves a post reflecting on it. It also offers a tantalising glimpse into what a government response to peak oil, climate change and economic contraction might look like if anyone had the imagination to create one.
Decentralization of the Occupy movement is as important as the decentralization of any other piece of our infrastructure. If the #OWS crowd popped up in small groups around NYC, they would be easier to raid individually, but not much worth it. If one goes down, there are sites still available to regroup and relocate. … Good communications could combine dispersed occupiers for various marches and individual protest demonstrations. Seriously, we need to be in little, flexible, creative bunches everywhere, not in one giant lump.
– New Yorker: The origins and future of Occupy Wall Street
– John Robb: The HIDDEN logic of the Occupy Movement
– Juan Cole: How Students Landed on the Front Lines of Class War
– Bloomberg, Kelly Finally Piss Off The Media
– Biggest Week Yet for Occupy Wall Street Coverage
Three elements have made the global movements of 2011 so powerful and different. 1) the extraordinary capacity to include all types of people 2) the impulse to move beyond traditional forms of the protest and contention, so as to create solutions for the problems identified 3) the horizontal and directly participatory form they take.
In the second phase of these movements, the focus shifts from acts of protest to instituting the type of change that the movements actually want to see happen in society as a whole. The capacity to create solutions grows as the movements expand in all directions, first through the appearance of multiple occupations connected among themselves, and then through the creation of—or collaboration with—groups or networks that are able to solve problems on a local level through cooperation and the sharing of skills and resources.
Cody Lundin imparts details that often pester my mind when thinking about emergency scenarios and in so doing makes me far less cavalier about the more grim possibilities. A great deal of this information would be useful right now for my family in Thailand as they suffer through the flood. Indeed there is a very third world flavor to Cody’s frugal, homemade approaches that speaks to me.
