Politics

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.

Transition in an Age of Austerity

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What is the potential for the Transition Towns movement in the current political climate? Isn’t ‘Lambeth the Co-operative Council’ a legitimate solution for south Londoners? Just how dangerous is it to mix up contructed scarcities with geophysical scarcities when talking about how to build resilience into local communities?

The emergence of regional Transition? A fascinating day in Lille

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The question of what a top-down response to peak oil, climate change and economic contraction, and the regional rolling out of resilience, might look like, has been often discussed since the early days of the Transition movement. There was the short-lived Somerset experiment, there’s been interesting work in Stroud, Bristol, Nottingham and various other places, but nothing yet that is especially coherent and integrated. So it was with that in mind that I was really fascinated to be asked to go to Lille to speak at a one-day conference called ‘Assises de la Transformation Ecologique et Sociale’ organised by the Conseil Regional Nord –Pas de Calais, the regional authority for the Nord- Pas de Calais region.

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.

Scarcity, shame and flapping arms in Athens

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Since February 2010, the crisis in Greece is being addressed with austerity measures as prescribed by the troika of EU, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund. At present, the government is negotiating yet more austerity, even if past measures failed to produce the desired results. On the contrary: their consequences are already devastating.

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.