How Insane is Global Trade?

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.

Re-Regionalization: Bioregional Development as a Regenerative Pathway

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.

To Leave or Remain: dichotomy or distraction?

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.

Localization: a Strategic Alternative to Globalized Authoritarianism

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.

What Wendell Berry’s Brush Teaches Us About Capitalism, Community, and “Inevitability”

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.

Brewing, Local Economies and the Imagination

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.

Libertarian Municipalism: Networked Cities as Resilient Platforms for Post-Capitalist Transition

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.

Cosmo-Localization: Can Thinking Globally and Producing Locally Really Save our Planet?

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.

Surviving the Future in America

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.

Podcast: The Future, and How to Survive it, with Shaun Chamberlin

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.”

How We Can Transition to a Bottom Up Economy

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.

Molly Scott Cato on ‘America First’ and economic localisation

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.