Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
White House strategist Steve Bannon’s project for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” appears to be out of the starting blocks and well on its way toward a glorious victory lap…While the Reagan and Bush II administrations sought to aggressively weed out unwanted federal rules, Trump appears to be taking a flamethrower to the entire garden patch.
Nature-like technologies, a phrase coined by Vladimir Putin, is a focal point of discussion in this recent interview with Dmitry Orlov. The technosphere can be a dangerous place, according to Orlov’s new book, Shrinking the Technosphere.
Because if individual action can’t alter the momentum of global warming, movements may still do the trick. Movements are how people organize themselves to gain power—enough power, in this case, to perhaps overcome the financial might of the fossil fuel industry.
Today, it takes a more energy intensive combination of automobiles, trucks and airplanes to do what a single passenger train was able to do in 1950. Furthermore, we lost a level of convenience in our lives that is in some ways unmatched today, and we lost a sense of community that our passenger rail system helped build and hold together
But now participatory budgeting, a concept in which citizens get to vote democratically on how a particular pot of public funds will be spent, has been gaining traction across the U.S. over the last few years, and promising to give citizens a voice in these matters.
The far-reaching solution of a global to local shift can move us beyond the left-right political theater to link hands in a diverse and united people’s movement for secure, meaningful livelihoods and a healthy planet.
Community Land Trusts began in the United States as a model of land tenure that emerged from the civil rights movement in the South. CLTs have slowly gained popularity over the past decades, expanding dramatically in recent years.
The revolutionaries in Rojava are working tirelessly to build up communes everywhere. They also go to less politicised people, or people that are politically far from them. Communes are structures at the grassroots of society; the commune is where self-organisation as propagated by the revolution mainly happens.
Cultural capital is rooted in society’s values and traditions. Sadly, over the past few generations in the West, we have departed from the time-honored (and honed) customs and rituals of our ancestors, and adopted a much more “it’s all about me” approach to life.
This article outlines the scope and limits of Buen Vivir, which can be translated as ‘good life’ or ‘good living’. This ‘good life’ has always been a pluralistic concept, namely ‘buenos convivires’: different ways of ‘living well together’.
Although the interventions are small-scale, it does seem possible to glean from these processes lessons and methods that can be used to foster another way of building urban public space based on collective praxis.
I think that is essentially what Transition has been saying all along; the combination with resilience science allows the message to be put across with much more force and rigour, and hopefully inform how practical efforts can better negotiate and transform political barriers.
