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.
By Shaun Chamberlin, Adam Grubb, Greening the Apocalypse
Transition Towns founder Rob Hopkins describes the late historian and green economist David Fleming as “one of the most original, brilliant, urgently-needed, under-rated and ahead-of-his-time thinkers of the last 50 years.”
By Chuck Collins, YES! magazine
Bottom Up is a comprehensive primer on the transition to a new economy—the place-based movement to rewire the economy for equity and ecological sustainability. It is rich in stories and detail for the curious or discouraged and those seeking a strategy to move toward a sustainable and equitable future.
By Rob Hopkins, Molly Scott Cato, Transition Network
The bioregional approach is about saying actually an awful lot of stuff can be done at the bioregion. Health systems could be organised there, you could have particular cultures at the bioregion level. You would certainly look to the vast majority of your food and clothes and furniture and those types of products at the bioregional level.
By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Resilience.org
The far-reaching solution of a global to local shift can move us beyond the left-right political theater to link hands in a diverse and united people's movement for secure, meaningful livelihoods and a healthy planet.
By Grant Henninger, Strong Towns
This is where buy local is different from Buy America. Buying locally-produced products that are sold in locally-owned stores is a key strategy for building local wealth. Every dollar spent locally is a dollar of wealth retained in the community. The alternative is for that wealth to leak into other communities while making the local community poorer. This is the community expression of the saying, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”
By Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, Post Carbon Institute
From a Transition perspective, a shortening of trade distances has to be a good thing, right? Bringing manufacturing back closer to where people live, thereby reducing carbon emissions, enabling more money to cycle within the national economy rather than globally? So far, so Transition… And yet.