By Richard Heinberg, Great Transition Initiative
Our current global society appears to be in the conservation phase of its adaptive cycle: it is at a peak of scale and integration. If the cyclical behavior of past societies is repeated in ours, recent trends toward globalization and urbanization will reach natural limits and be reversed.
By Tara Lohan, The Revelator
Despite the warning signs — climate change, biodiversity loss, depleted soils and a shrinking supply of cheap energy — we continue to push along with an economy fueled by perpetual growth on a finite planet.We’ll need to reckon with this discrepancy.
By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Local Futures
Localization means getting out of the highly unstable and exploitative bubbles of speculation and debt, and back to the real economy – our interface with other people and the natural world.
By Local Futures Staff, Local Futures
The way trade works in the global economy can be insane – it wastes resources, worsens climate change, and undermines the livelihoods of millions of small-scale producers worldwide.
By Daniel Christian Wahl, Medium.com
To relocalise effectively we need to map the productive potential of our regions and communities, including resource, material, waste and energy flows and identify threads and opportunities for relocalising production and consumption.
By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Local Futures
Leave/Remain was always a false dichotomy. The real choice is between a corporate economic system that systematically destroys livelihoods and undermines the environment and, on the other hand, a form of economic decentralisation that actively encourages both community and ecological renewal. The British people weren’t offered that choice in the referendum. But it’s on offer out there in the real world.
By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Local Futures
I believe economic localization is the most strategic solution to addressing the woes of the disenfranchized. The localized path would involve a 180-degree turn-around in economic policy, so that business and finance become place-based and accountable to democratic processes.
By Russell Arben Fox, In media res
The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, the latest collection of writings by Wendell Berry, isn't a perfect book, nor the perfect expression of his powerful vision of what constitutes a good life or a good community.
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
One of the most fascinating craft breweries in the UK can be found nestled in a series of arches beneath a railway bridge in Bermondsey in London. For the last 9 years, The Kernel, under the guidance of its founder Evin O’Riordan, have pioneered not just amazing and distinctive beers, but also an approach rooted in connection to place, to a different way of doing business.
By Kevin Carson, P2P Foundation Blog
As Michel Bauwens puts it, the commons paradigm replaces the traditional Social Democratic paradigm in which value is created in the “private” (i.e. corporate) sector through commodity labor, and a portion of this value is redistributed by the state and by labor unions, to one in which value is co-created within the social commons outside the framework of wage labor and the cash nexus, and the process of value creation is governed by the co-creators themselves.
By Fernanda Marin, Sharon Ede, OuiShare
Fablabs, makerspaces, emerging global knowledge commons… These are but some of the outcomes of a growing movement that champions globally-sourced designs for local economic activity. Its core idea is simple: local ownership of the means to produce basic manufactures and services can change our economic paradigm, making our cities self-sufficient and help the planet.
By Erik Lindberg, Resilience.org
In our taut economy, it is difficult to accept a sense of moral good rooted in anything other than me and my autonomous goals, and this has been reinforced and been overdetermined by American history. But this is thus to say that American history is limited by its youth and by the time and place in which it was born. We are like children born in a refugee camp or in war-torn region and know nothing else.