Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Mutual aid is a concept and practice that has come up many times in the stories we tell on The Response — so we thought it would be helpful to devote an entire episode to exploring what mutual aid is with someone who is deeply immersed in it on the ground.
Victoria Collier and Ben Ptashnik are a couple with a vision: they want to teach how to create self-sustaining ecological community where people can grow food, disengage from destructive systems with the use of renewable energy and green building, and create community projects that benefit everyone while raising the quality of life for the next generations.
What could possibly go right? We can notice the community solutions growing among the marginalized – be they youth, poor, people of color – and lift them up as a more prosperous way to live.
In my mind what must undergird any energy transition is the building of a new way of being that is made possible by a much lower-consumption world coupled with living more communally.
After I lost my home, I realised we can’t rely on politicians. Communities must act to protect their future.
What if, instead of putting the pressure on each person, we explored what communities can do together to get through this and be stronger in future crises?
The way forward seems to involve re-forming and re-localizing the economic system to create resiliency from the grassroots up, focusing on common needs, rather than having someone else’s idea of “what’s good for us” being imposed from the top down.
There are so many people out there just searching for something to do that’s positive, that’s going to make a difference.
This book provides a fairly short but detailed critical discussion of the nature of our basically capitalist economic system, its faults, why it is not just unsatisfactory but is leading to global breakdown, the alternative we must work for, and how to achieve it.
On this episode, Nate is joined by Marty Kearns, a civic organizer and networking specialist. He and Marty discuss why both networks and communities will be critical to the coming challenges we face.
Transition Southampton used seed funding to work in three very different parts of the city. Rob Hopkins spoke to Clare, Liz and Si from the group to find out how they used enticing ‘What If?’ questions and built on existing connections to help local people imagine a different future for their neighbourhoods and what emerged from the project.
As the Joseph Campbell quote at the top of this article suggests, we will have to start the collective process by appreciating that no one is going to ‘fix’ the predicament of collapse for us, and that it cannot be fixed, only adapted to.
