Don’t Just Buy American, Buy Local

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.”

Richard Heinberg on ‘America First’

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.

Going Local: the Solution-Multiplier

By Local Futures Staff, Local Futures

A short introduction to localization.

Beyond Trump: The Path to Real Change

By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Richard Heinberg, Local Futures

This webinar serves as a hopeful antidote to the paralysis felt by many following the election of Donald Trump as the 45th US President.

After Brexit and Trump: don’t Demonise; Localise!

By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Rupert Read, The Ecologist

Both Trump and Brexit can be explained by the failure of mainstream political elites to address the pain inflicted on ordinary citizens in the neoliberal era.

The Free Trade Fallacy

By John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report

One of the major currents underlying 2016’s political turmoil in Europe and the United States, in fact, has been a sharp disagreement about the value of free trade.

Rural Sociology

By Wayne Roberts

For mutual interests to come to the fore, each city and each rural area surrounding a city needs to become intertwined and re-entangled.

The European Union and the Misery of Bigness

By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee

Years ago, the great Austrian economist Leopold Kohr argued that overwhelming evidence from science, culture and biology all pointed to one unending truth: things improve with an unending process of division.

Building Walls Cannot be the Answer

By Vincent Liegey, Anisabel Veillot, Degrowth.de

As much as building walls cannot be the answer to the horrible situation of refugees seeking asylum in Europe, it cannot be the means of choice for protecting national economies either.

7 Paths to Development That Bring Neighborhoods Wealth, Not Gentrification

By Marjorie Kelly, YES! magazine

In cities across the nation, a few enjoy rising affluence while many struggle to get by.