By Fran Boait, openDemocracy
Here are ten things that have changed over the past ten years, including some huge achievements, that should be cause for hope and celebration.
By Caroline Whyte, Feasta
Many of the severest crises we’re facing at present – e.g. climate instability, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of vital resources, and the dangerous compromise of ecosystem health through the spread of waste plastic and other pollution – stem directly from economic expansion hitting against ’hard’ limits in the physical world.
By David Graeber, Chris Brooks, ROAR Magazine
Bullshit jobs are ones where the person doing them secretly believes that if the job (or even sometimes the entire industry) were to disappear, it would make no difference — or perhaps, as in the case of say telemarketers, lobbyists, or many corporate law firms, the world would be a better place.
By Mathew Lawrence, Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Red Pepper
August 1 was Earth Overshoot Day, the date when we have taken more from nature than it can renew in an entire year. Unsustainable extraction is occurring on a planetary scale: we are using natural resources 1.7 times faster in 2018 than the Earth’s ecosystems can regenerate this year.
By Eli Feghali, Open Democracy
The question we explored was simple: “how do we get to a new economy?” How exactly do we move forward with sophistication and seriousness to build the power necessary to take on the existing system? As Makani Themba, one of the conference’s plenary speakers put it, “It’s not just about how we build a new, parallel economy—it’s also about how we starve the beast which is the current one.”
By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning
Transnational corporations have become the dominant force directing our world. Humanity is accelerating toward a precipice of overconsumption, and the large transnationals are the primary agents driving us there.
By Ruby Irene Pratka, Shareable
Bâtiment 7 opened to the public in May of this year, still entirely staffed by volunteers. The large complex houses a bicycle workshop, a car repair garage, a woodworking workshop, a co-op grocery store, a library and event space, a bar and a tiny microbrewery — and that's just the ground floor.
By Negin Owliaei, Inequality.org
“Knowing that we need better jobs and a good environment? That’s all you need to know to tell your lawmakers,” Short says. “It’s up to us to express our will.”
By Upstream staff, Shareable
The latest episode of the Upstream podcast takes a deep dive into the worker cooperatives movement: a broad selection of organizations, activists, and cooperatively-structured workplaces that advocate for and embody workplace and economic democracy.
By Oliver Sylvester-Bradley, Permaculture Association
Platform cooperatives that are member owned and democratically controlled - allowing everyone that is affected by the business, be they customers, suppliers, workers or investors, a say in how the business is run and managed.