Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
A pluriversal history would thus encourage us to look to the relational “ingenuity” of non-modern worlds, both extinct and extant, for guidance about how to live more sustainably.
From all that has been seen, it can be affirmed that the future of the planet will be local, or it will not be.
Away from the screens of the mainstream media, the crude ‘bigger is better’ narrative that has dominated economic thinking for centuries is being challenged.
Landskap, therefore, is the nature we have together, where we live. The word expresses that we are part of the landscape and that the landscape is part of us.
Explore the diminishing marginal returns of both World’s Fairs and technology in general, and consider what’s next as dreams of a high-tech utopia go the way of the animatronic dinosaurs.
Now that we have glimpsed for the first time a planet-wide threat to all that lives and breathes, we might acknowledge at long last that we have been poorly served by a mode of understanding that must turn everything into the same kind of lock – the same mechanism – before it can proceed.
There is no “getting back to normal”; now is the dawn of a new age, either by design or default. We have to thoroughly transform how we live, or it will be transformed for us.
If I accept the seriousness of our predicament the question becomes, to use a familiar phrase, “How then shall we live?” What can people who care about life on Earth do to help at this point?
Philosophers from Aristotle to Polanyi have consistently argued that nothing can so engage people as real tactile experience, and real practical work.
In my talk, I encouraged the participants to think inside the box of Norrbotten for food production. What can actually be produced in a good way on their lands?
The global pandemic has revealed just how fragile our global supply chains are. This is something we’ve talked about a lot at Strong Towns, but of course the disruptions aren’t only being experienced in the United States.
