Building Community

Time to riot!

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The Riot for Austerity came about this way. In 2007, after the release of the IPCC report, and a number of books drawing attention to climate change, a friend of mine and I were discussing our frustration that no political organization was considering any kind of emissions cuts that even resembled those necessary to limit the damage from climate change. In fact whenever we discussed the 90+% emissions cuts required to give us the best chance of a reasonable stable climate, the immediate reaction was “that’s not going to happen!”

We set two goals. First, we would spend a year trying to get our emissions down by 90% over the American average. Second, we’d use this as part of a larger public strategy to point out that it can be done – that we don’t have to wait for political action – indeed, that we can’t wait.

Stopping poverty through sustainability in the South Bronx: An interview with Majora Carter

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“…I am putting all of the pieces together in order to launch a national brand of locally grown produce—everything from the most efficient hydroponic growing systems, brand identity, USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] support, political allies, relationships with institutional buyers, and investors. I want to redirect some of the capital flows in the food business to revitalize underutilized industrial space and people.”

How to start a worker co-op

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In the age of unemployment, downsizing, and outsourcing, where can a poor soul find a job? Well, maybe it’s time we create our own. Self-employment is an option and can seem freeing, but it’s hard to do everything yourself and find time for a non-work life. The worker coop is an alternative to the isolation of self-employment and the exploitation of traditional jobs.

Hope for the Hell of it

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Hope lies in the future. Look at what’s already here. If 61 native nations oppose a tar-sands pipeline, it’s because they’ve survived the last 519 years of Euro-invasive attempts to eliminate their rights, their identities, and sometimes their lives. They’re still here. So are the Immokalee workers. And the feminists. And the climate-change activists. And Nelson Mandela. So are you. Do something hopeful about it, just for the hell of it. There’s no reason not to.

Crashing the bus: why we should watch the Tea Party

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There is a way in which The Tea Party’s uncompromising stance does make sense. Perhaps they are willing to crash the economy not just or only out of ignorance of basic economics—or basic economics as, importantly, it is articulated by liberal academic economists and Wall Street analysts alike. Perhaps they see this crisis as an opportunity to make their stand against a system that cannot continue along its current path. The path to a sustainable future, they seem to suggest, will involve some changes to our expectations about what we deserve and what we can expect.

The commons as an antidote to relentless growth

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Commons reduce money-induced growth because they make us more independent of money. The more we produce commons, the less we or the state has to pay for goods.

Commons reduce population-induced growth because they are associated with a multiplicity of sufficiency strategies which create prosperity by sharing.

Commons escape the growth compulsion, because all those things that are produced as commons, do not have to be made artificially scarce. And there is no incentive for artificial scarcity because commons are not produced as goods to be exchanged but they foster and maintain social relationships, satisfy needs and solve problems. Directly.

The commons offers hope for healing America’s racial & class divide

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Our nation needs to make a dramatic re-investment in broadening wealth and opportunity for Americans who have been historically left out of prosperity. Massive government investments of the past that helped reduce the income gap, such as the 19th Century Homestead Act and post-World War II veterans and housing benefits were effectively “whites only.” Since the end of legal discrimination in the 1960s, there has not been a similar mass investment in economic opportunity that African-Americans and other people of color could benefit from as equal citizens.

On an ordinary summer’s evening in a Transition town . . .

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It was the fact that when we met up as a group in these public spaces something happened between us. Something we held in common. We understood implicitly what we were doing and why — sharing stuff, organising events, going through the agenda. When I looked at this working-together in the visioning it looked like an energy field, the kind of energy field you sense when you stand by a hive humming with bees. A hum of warmth and intelligence that allows people to naturally collaborate and make that low-energy downshift happen….You just need to tune in and act.

Design for social innovation: An interview with Ezio Manzini

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When I use the words small, open, local and connected, this is my way of telling the story. People can tell it in another way, but the result is similar. Of course it’s a metaphor: having small entities that when connected, become bigger entities. It’s evident that it comes very strongly from the network. But once it appears, it’s not only related to what you can do, strictly speaking, in the network and technologies. It’s a way to imagine the way in which the social services are delivered in society and the way in which we can imagine economies that are at the same time rooted in a place and partially self-sufficient but connected to the others and open to the others.

Fish fresh off the hook from community-supported fishers

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In many parts of the world, it is hard to find fresh fish to buy, even if you live next to the ocean. In Halifax, the largest city in Nova Scotia, a Canadian province known for its fishery, it takes at least six days for local fillets to make it from the fishing boats to the supermarket. With almost a week from sea to fork, the fish can hardly be called fresh. Now that’s changing. A group of five fishers have founded Off The Hook in a rebuke to the way fish have been bought and sold in Atlantic Canada. They call it a community supported fishery — a nod to the local food movement’s community-supported agriculture (CSA) direct marketing programs whereby farmers sell directly to customers.

To touch a future sky: Raising children in changing times

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We have received a tremendous gift – to be alive at the edge of these changing times. It’s not an easy gift, if we look open-eyed into possible futures. Yet within this gift lies the tremendous opportunity (and yes, responsibility) of crafting tools to place in the hands of those who come after, to enable them to shape the world in which they live through their own vision.