Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We feature voices of the thousands who marched on the nation’s Capitol Saturday for the Poor People’s Campaign. The mass demonstration followed six weeks of actions around the country and more than 2,500 arrests, as protesters join what they are calling a “moral revival” to demand an end to systemic racism, poverty, the war economy and ecological devastation.
We need something like the guilds in the Middle Ages. We need leagues of cities. We need leagues of co-ops. In Fukushima you can’t just say, “I’m going to have a fishing co-op in my village”. Sometimes you need scale to answer certain issues that can’t be solved at any local level.
An increasing number of people are beginning to understand that the world we participate in is too complex, magnificent and changeable for any single perspective to do justice to its diversity and complexity.
The release of the U.N. report on extreme poverty in the United States comes amid a nationwide, weeks-long direct action campaign known as the new Poor People’s Campaign, aimed at fighting poverty and racism in the United States.
What are the unhealthy stories that we tell now? The story of unlimited growth. The story that we are separate. Any number of stories about who we are and our place in the world, and what it means to be alive.
The diverse founders of the First Ecosocialist International explicitly adopted a pluricosmovisionary perspective which establishes the conuco, or small farm, as the base unit for an emergent, future society founded upon the recovery of historical memory, territorial organization by bio-region, the rights of Mother Earth, the decolonization of the mind, and the reconfiguration of indigenous nations.
I believe economic localization is the most strategic solution to addressing the woes of the disenfranchized. The localized path would involve a 180-degree turn-around in economic policy, so that business and finance become place-based and accountable to democratic processes.
Progressives reference the ‘new economy’ in order to describe a system that is based on social and environmental justice. Yet type these words into any search engine and you’ll find that we don’t own it, neoliberals do.
With over a decade-and-a-half of American schooling under my belt, I feel that I can assert with absolute certainty that there are some fundamental flaws in how we have chosen to structure education.
Thanks to Rob for his reply to my recent thoughts on the Transition Towns movement. Here are some brief notes in response.
Growth is the social glue that has held liberal industrial societies together, which is one of several connected reasons why we won’t address our relationship to our natural ecology by becoming “more liberal” or “more progressive.” Sustainability, then, is neither liberal nor progressive.
We may benefit if we simultaneously hold two extremes of action; both the huge, universal movements for ecology and justice and the daily, personal actions that help slightly and make us better examples to others.
