Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Within Local Futures’ broad focus on promoting economic localization – shifting our economies towards place-based, ecological, human-scale activity – we promote vernacular and traditional knowledge, skills, practices and cultures, including in the built environment.
As climate change makes disasters like hurricanes, floods, and wildfires become more frequent, severe, and expensive, residents and policymakers are increasingly turning toward community land trusts (CLTs)—nonprofits that buy land to ensure community control, stave off displacement, and ensure long-term affordability.
Many people are now realizing that they cannot move forward without us. And indigenous peoples are saying: “you are not going to talk on our behalf, nor about us, anymore”.
Growth in Native communities is relationship-based, not economy-based, and so Native CFDIs are putting much effort into building localized decision-making that provides not only financial support, but also builds trust.
Already it is starting to make economic as well as social sense to produce more food and other essentials locally, and exchange them outside existing industrial consumption systems. In other words, to live bioregionally now!
As a follow-up to Episode 61 of the Crazy Town podcast, Noam Chomsky, the well-known linguist, author, and social critic, joins Asher Miller in Crazy Town to discuss the failures and dominance of neoliberalism.
As part of Mexico’s world-renowned community forestry model for sustainability, the example of the Chimalapas shines. It has produced important results in conservation of a natural biosphere considered one of the most important lungs of Mexico.
Like vegetation on a burned grassland, Mexico is seeing a growth in community resistance movements in defense of local territories, of life and of Mother Earth.
‘Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice’, a new book by Raj Patel and Rupa Marya, is a tour of the human body that reveals the links between our biology and political and economic injustices such as racism, poverty and colonialism.
“We do not want our children and people who come from other communities to see indigenous exploitation as a normal thing.”
In November, on the banks of the calm, reflective waters of the Cascaloa Ciénaga, a floodplain lake extending 12,000 hectares (120 sq km) in northern Colombia, a group of traditional fishers met.
Balance and harmony are so fundamental for the Misak people’s way of life that they are willing to go to the streets to fight for it, if necessary – but always peacefully, and with their face masks firmly in place.
