Notwithstanding Cities & Food

By Wayne Roberts, Resilience.org

The powers and resources of city governments must be protected and enhanced to provide proper oversight and governance of new food challenges.

Warning to Local Governments: Adopt Climate Adaptation Strategies or Face Credit Downgrades

By Mark Hand, Climate Progress

The growing effects of climate change, including climbing global temperatures and rising sea levels, are forecast to have an increasing economic impact on state and local governments in the United States. “This will be a growing negative credit factor for issuers without sufficient adaptation and mitigation strategies,” Moody’s noted in a statement released in conjunction with the report.

Want to See How Governments Are Making Real Progress? Look to the Cities Tackling Our Biggest Problems

By Sarah van Gelder, YES! magazine

If you’ve been looking to the federal government for action on big challenges such as poverty, climate change, and immigration, this has been a devastating decade...a more hopeful story is unfolding. Cities are taking action.

Hidden Power Grab Stops Communities From Deciding Their Own Futures

By David Morris, On The Commons

There has been much written about the federalist nature of the American political system. But virtually all of it focuses on the rights of states vs. the federal government. At this historical moment, where the last bastion of true democracy is at the local level, we need to extend the debate to include the rights of communities vs. the states.

Skin In The Game

By John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report

The old-fashioned school districts that provided me with a convenient example in last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report represent a mode of politics that nobody, but nobody, talks about in today’s America. Across the whole landscape of our contemporary political life, with remarkably few exceptions, when people talk about the relationship between the political sphere and the rest of life, the political sphere they have in mind consists of existing, centralized governmental systems.