Alex Jensen

Within Local Futures’ broad focus on promoting economic localization – shifting our economies towards place-based, ecological, human-scale activity – we promote vernacular and traditional knowledge, skills, practices and cultures, including in the built environment.

Traditional/original AT, based on communal social arrangements, hand-crafted from local, natural materials that cultures have used since centuries mostly for subsistence purposes, satisfies practically all of the principles of deep sustainability.

This is one of the signal lessons of the inspiring work of Tosepan: that a culture of solidarity — fortified by cooperative(s) providing for material and cultural needs — deepens democracy, and that this in turn makes it very hard for predatory capital to enter.

A global perspective – where true costs cannot be fobbed off on the poor and colonized – is necessary for gaining a meaningful and accurate picture of the relationship between wealth, growth, development and environmental integrity and sustainability.

Now, in addition to the products that magically appear on Western store shelves absolutely shorn of history and provenance, much of the hitherto distant pollution emitted in their production has also arrived. It has come home to roost. Globalization’s blowback.

The ‘Great Acceleration’ of economic activity in the past 60 years has led to a series of interlocking crises. Here’s why a Great Deceleration is necessary for us “to live again with affection and beauty on this earth.”