Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It is always refreshing to read Peter Linebaugh’s writings on the commons because he brings such rich historical perspectives to bear, revealing the commons as both strangely alien and utterly familiar.
The illusion that progress will solve the problems of the future is presented to obscure the ancient truth that future-problems are created by the present.
The sharing phenomenon is turning the traditional business model on its head across sectors from transportation to hotels and tourism, and everything in between.
By owning many elements of a local food system infrastructure – farms, distribution, retail and more – but operating them as a trust governed by stakeholders, the Food Commons believes it can be economically practical to build a new type of food system that is labor-friendly, ecologically responsible, hospitable to a variety of small enterprises, and able to grow high-quality food for local consumption.
A community’s identity is inevitably entangled in its geography and its buildings, its history and its leaders.
“How come there’s no public dimension to natural resource law, and the public who uses these areas and actually owns most of them doesn’t have a say in what goes on?”
What are we to make of Monsanto’s sponsoring of organic school gardens? Of local food bike tours made possible by Pepsi?
Cosmopolitanism has become a powerful current in the development of alternative globalisation discourses.
FLOK Society is a government-sponsored project to imagine how Ecuador might make a strategic transition to a workable post-capitalist knowledge economy.
In a precarious context induced by a struggle for the essential, one term has re-emerged as indispensable, providing many of us with a new sense of direction, creation and sharing, and ultimately, like a boomerang, assuming the ‘austere’ dignity of that which cannot be renounced: the commons.
So why should investors always have the upper hand in “development” plans when the resource at stake is a beloved building or public space?
In her brilliant new book, Mary Christina Wood, a noted environmental law scholar at the University of Oregon, Eugene, courageously sweeps aside the bland half-truths and evasions about environmental law.
