Culture & Behavior

The twilight of protest

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It’s become common to see activists rejecting, often with quite a bit of heat, the suggestion that they might want to embrace in their own lives the changes they hope to get the rest of the world to adopt. In the twilight years of American empire, that’s a very convenient attitude, but it deprives peak oil and environmental activists of a tool that worked remarkably well the last time it was tried, and closes off avenues for shaping the future that might be better kept open.

The commons law project: A vision of green governance

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For the past two years or more, I’ve been working on a major research and writing project to try to recover from the mists of history the bits and pieces of what might be called “commons law” (not to be confused with common law). Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources. Most of these governance traditions deal with natural resources such as farmland, forests, fisheries, water and wild game. Commons law has existed in many forms, and in many cultures, over millennia.

Environment – May 16

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– WWF Report: Consumption of Earth’s resources unsustainable
– Monthly Review: Marx’s ecology and the understanding of land cover change
– New report from Club of Rome warns about humanity’s ability to survive without a major change in direction
– The Big Fix: documentary exposes BP, U.S. Gov’t on Gulf disaster/Interview: the Tickells, filmmakers
– James Hansen: Game Over for the Climate

When the experiment fails

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Celebrating Failure is perhaps the least understood ingredient in the book. Because we live in a culture of success. No matter how we talk about losing being part of the game, it’s still losing. Victors take all, stand on the podium crowned with laurels, king of the castle, biggest banker on the block. No one wants to be in the beaten team, on the bottom of the pecking order. But to be in Transition means we have to understand this win-or-lose mindset as an old order we need to transform.

A vision of America the possible

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The deep, transformative changes sketched in the first half of this manifesto provide a path to America the Possible. But that path is only brought to life when we can combine this vision with the conviction that we will pull together to build the necessary political muscle for real change.

The Croft

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For those of you who don’t know anything about crofting, in its heyday it could be seen as a perfect model for Transition…Most crofts consist of a few acres of what’s called ‘in-bye’ land – the actual smallholding itself, on which the croft house is usually situated – along with rights to put livestock out onto the ‘common grazings’ of the crofting township. Crofters now have rights to security of tenure, fixed rents, and the right to inherit or assign crofts pretty much in perpetuity. Recently, the right for crofting communities to buy out their land has been enshrined in an astonishing package of legislation that in an ideal world would mean that crofting townships like ours should flourish.