Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As small-scale stations whose airwaves spread over short distances, community radio stations deal with local issues and problems, while at the same time they examine the multiple threads that exist between nature and culture.
We need to dive deeper, heal the hurts of colonialism and remake ourselves and our world using healthy collective decision-making processes that bring out the best in us, rather than the worst.
The exercise of grassroots democracy, however, need not focus on the state and its formal institutions. The role of the state is not intrinsic to the practice of grassroots democracy.
The reality is our existing politics compromises that future and, like carbon and capitalism, needs to be dismantled, transcended and replaced so that more radical forms of democracy can take root.
We transform the very meaning of public and private by daring to proclaim the communal sphere as existing, real, and growing, evolving, and necessary.
The body politic was sick long before the virus arrived, already at risk of collapse under the weight of its elite hierarchies. When its fever breaks, we must learn the right lessons about how to overcome the underlying issues that threaten its very existence.
Starhawk is an author, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, founder of Earth Activist Training, and a prominent voice in modern earth-based spirituality and ecofeminism.
She answers the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?
A good part of Western thought has forgotten or concealed the existence of another democracy, which was prior to the representative one, and which can be described as direct, participatory, radical or local.
The question that divides left from right should no longer be “how big is the state?”, but “to whom should its powers be devolved?”.
In terms of broader systems change, participatory budgeting, when adopted, marks a real change in the way that folks do business, a real change in the way that government operates. For me, and for many folks, this is a beginning of a larger participatory democratic wave…
Citizens Assemblies are a powerful tool for hearing the thoughts of a population without the filter of political interference, lack of understanding, and the polarity that has been driven by social media and surveillance capitalism. But what are they, and how might Citizens Assemblies be a vital tool for creating the spaces that allow imagination back into our public life?
Symbiosis, an expanding network of revolutionary organizers and local initiatives, is assembling a confederation of democratic community institutions across North America. This project has been gathering support over the past year and will be launched at a continental congress in Detroit from September 18-22.
