Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Based on principles and practices of resource use reduction, sharing, conviviality, solidarity, and mutual aid, the Brisbane Tool Library can be considered a small-scale laboratory for a reorientation of society towards degrowth.
It’s been more a year and a half in the making, but I’m pleased to announce the release of my new book, The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead!
Practiced and shared well, grief gives voice and value to the diversity of the life journey, expressing and crystallising the whole, often painful canvas of lived experience.
The presumption that food should be a commodity departs from millennia of human history in which societies found ways to share food and ensure that people had enough to eat.
The social order that capital’s apologists defend as inevitable and eternal is “the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.” Acceptance of the wages-system as a natural way to live and work did not happen easily.
Ivan Illich is one of those rare, seminal thinkers to whom I keep returning, again and again, because he fearlessly grapples with core themes that otherwise go ignored.
I believe commoning remains one of the more promising avenues that we have for addressing the profound structural challenges of contemporary politics, economics, and culture.
Can property law be used to reclaim our common wealth and transform capitalism in the process? Peter Barnes, a socially minded entrepreneur and commoner, believes it can.
Between the decline of feudalism and the rise of industrial capitalism, rural society was transformed by the complex of processes that are collectively known as enclosure.
In order to close the circle, the commons must be that which helps to provide the minimum subsistence that guarantees a decent quality of life.
Earth’s climate system has the attributes of a common-pool resource. The climate system’s limited ability to absorb greenhouse gas pollution makes it a depletable resource. I
Indeed, we have wandered out of our knowledge and lost track of the commons. But there is another sun, shining in a different quarter of the sky.
