Activism

Coming down the Dark Mountain

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Most campaign groups have a single focus, but Transition has many (87 Ingredients and tools for starters) – food and economics, inner work and group dynamics. Instead of putting energy into confronting the business-as-usual mindset of the industrialised world, it puts it into building social and practical infrastructures for a future when that mindset begins to lose its grip on reality. Backed by a network of similar initiatives in cities and towns in the UK and elsewhere it can provide a secure base from which to proceed.

Peak Moment 219: Prairie Fire – Revolutionize the Food System

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Novelist Dan Armstrong’s Prairie Fire is a fast-paced thriller whose characters forge unlikely alliances to revolutionize the American food system. It’s spearheaded by farmers squeezed by skyrocketing oil prices while marketeers get whopping price gains. This revolution is unlikely to succeed, yet… well, we won’t spoil it! In Dan’s Taming the Dragon, climate change causes Chinese grain production to plummet, bringing the world to the brink. Dan illuminates the real-world backdrop behind both novels. His solution? Localize food production. Meet farmer Harry MacCormack with exciting results in central Oregon.

Beyond Occupy: progressive activists in Europe

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Occupy is part of a wide range of subterranean movements that explore ways to complement representative democracy and empower citizenship. Some citizens want to build stronger democratic institutions: others don’t trust elected representatives any more and promote a change that starts at a local level and in daily life.

For real change, conversations not debates

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People around the country have been forming small groups like Resilience Circles and social action affinity groups. These groups are a way to relearn skills of mutuality, consensus-building, story-sharing, and real listening. They form an essential piece of the architecture of social movements built on solidarity and relatedness.

But pulling together a small group can be a real challenge.

In praise of anarchy, Part I

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Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin is our prince’s name, and he eventually became a renowned scientist who advanced the understanding of the history of glaciers, an historian of revolutionary movements, foremost theoretician of anarchism, and, because of his lifelong burning desire to do something to help the plight of the common man, something of a revolutionary himself.

‘Degrowth is not a liberal agenda: Relocalisation and the limits to low energy cosmopolitanism’

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Democracy, individualism , liberalism and many of the dimensions of modern societies that we most cherish and take for granted, emerged on the back of high energy throughput and growth. The pacified, individuated personality structure which allows the ‘I’ to be partially dissociated from the ‘We’ is itself historically and metabolically specific. It is very difficult for people with such an elaborated sense of self even to imagine the worldview of other people living in the past, or in those very few simpler societies in the present which have not been forcibly integrated into the connected modern world.

It is equally difficult to imagine the values, predispositions or likely attitudes of our children’s children’s children, living in a world which, if James Kunstler and Richard Heinberg are correct, will have become larger, more closed and less connected. But one thing does seem clear: degrowth is not a liberal prospect [excerpts from a to-be-published paper].

Thousands surround Spanish Parliament in bid to “Occupy Congress” and stop austerity

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Thousands of people surrounded the Spanish Parliament in Madrid on Tuesday to protest austerity measures and the loss of public confidence in elected leaders. The “Occupy Congress” protest came as the conservative administration of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy prepares to unveil further austerity measures on Thursday. After hours of protest, police in riot gear charged against demonstrators with batons and fired rubber bullets. Thirty-five people were arrested, and at least 60 people were injured. We go to Madrid to speak with independent journalist Maria Carrion.

Land and resources – Sept 25

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-Land grabbing and food sovereignty in West and Central Africa
-Africa: Land, Water and Resource-Grabbing and Its Impact on Food Security
-Antonio Trejo, Honduras rights lawyer, killed at wedding
-Chinese villagers protest at slow progress over land dispute
-The global need of non-violent struggle around land rights: a path for change?