Cecosesola of Venezuela Wins Right Livelihood Award!

By David Bollier, David Bollier blog

You could say that Cecosesola has learned how to ignore the market and set its own terms for providing goods and services.

Páramos at Risk: The Interconnected Threats to a Biodiversity Hotspot

By Daniel Henryk Rasolt, The Revelator

Páramos, experts say, may also serve as a sort of buffer against climate-change-induced recession of tropical mountain glaciers and extended droughts — if we can protect them.

The Environmental Consequences of Monetary Dysfunction

By Graham Barnes, Feasta

Dysfunction of the money-system underpins the problems of the world’s multiple converging crises. Discuss. Might that assertion be taking an ideological position, encouraged by the echo chambers of like-minded twitterati? This piece is an attempt to tease out the nature of the underlying connection, and in doing so describe some of the attack surfaces that are available to those bent on change.

Modern Monetary Theory and Strong Towns

By Charles Marohn, Strong Towns

My skepticism aside, my goal here is not to convince the passionate supporters of endless federal money printing that this is a bad idea – you’ve got your thing and you really believe it and I don’t want to quarrel over it in this piece – but to point out to you, and especially those sympathetic to the ends if not the means of what you advocate for, that Modern Monetary Theory is not going to solve the problems we are trying to address at Strong Towns.

How the European Social Enterprise SMart is Creating a Safety Net for Freelancers

By Kevin Stark, Shareable

SMart is a social enterprise founded in 1998 in Belgium. The project's aim is to simplify the careers of freelancers in cities across Europe where SMart operates. These days, there are many freelancer services — cooperatives, coworking spaces, unions — but at the time of its inception, SMart officials were focused on one subsection of this workforce: artists.

The Ecological Land Co-op

By Shaun Chamberlin, Transition Network

The ELC is based on the idea that smallholdings provide an ideal context for diverse, desirable low-carbon, localised lifestyles that provide satisfying employment, a reliable, home-grown food supply, and a desperately needed model for true sustainability that is in harmony with the local ecology.

Teaching Ourselves Out of the Industrial Economy

By Allan Stromfeldt Christensen, From Filmers to Farmers

Seeing how the collapse of economies is turning into a bit more than just a fad, where viable and applicable, teaching ourselves out of our jobs and professions before they're pulled out from under us might come in rather handy.