(Source: sadisticbiter, via sustainablefuture)
when living locally becomes a revolutionary act. putting ideas into action, one neighbourhood at a time, for social and environmental alternatives.
May 24, 2012
May 16, 2012
How Richmond, California is Building an Economy Based on Co-ops
At the height of the recession, the unemployment rate in Richmond, Calif., topped out at a dismal 19%. That figure has more recently crept down about three points, an improvement that might be worth celebrating if the city didn’t still have so far to go.
City councilman Tom Butt deadpans that Richmond, a city of about 100,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area just north of Oakland, is a place with “more than the usual number of socioeconomic challenges.” A large share of the immigrant population doesn’t speak English. Crime is high—Richmond is regularly ranked among the most dangerous cities in the country—meaning local residents who’ve gone through the criminal justice system have even rougher odds of landing a job. This is not, in other words, a place where traditional business models alone can dent poverty.
“There’s not a lot of help coming from the federal government, or the state government,” says the city’s Green Party mayor, Gayle McLaughlin. “So we’re kind of on our own.” Two years ago, she went all the way to Spain in search of another economic model that might reinvigorate her city, once the locus of bustling shipyards that produced hundreds of boats for battle during World War II.
The Basque Country in Spain is home to the world’s most famous worker-owned co-op, the Mondragon Corporation, based in the town of Mondragon. The 55-year-old corporation includes some 250 smaller co-ops, with more than 80,000 employees, the vast majority of them members and owners themselves. Mondragon is today the seventh largest company in Spain, with its fingers in finance, retail, and manufacturing, and it has become a kind of Meccafor far-flung groups eager to learn how to create their own co-op businesses.
May 9, 2012
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
Occupy the Farm - Berkeley - 4/22/2012 (Earth Day)
Here’s a little taste of what 300 community members can accomplish within a couple of hours.
“Today we are reclaiming this land to grow healthy food to sustain our East Bay communities. We envision a future of food sovereignty, in which farming is accessible and familiar part of urban life, in which available land is used for sustainable agriculture to meet local needs. We’re starting with the Gill Tract because:
* These are the last five acres of Class 1 soil in the East Bay. 90% of the original land has been paved over and developed, contaminating the land for generations to come. * Students, professors, and community have been fighting for decades to save this amazing land from development, and use it for sustainable urban agriculture.
* UCB Capital Projects currently holds this land and has slated it for rezoning and development in 2012 [aka Whole Foods will destroy it]
* Meanwhile, the university is using the undeveloped land for genetic research which could be conducted in numerous other university-owned locations.
* The Gill Tract is a unique, last-of-its-kind resource for sustainable urban agriculture food production, research, and education.”
I’m working on a video compilation of the day of action. Stay tuned…Something really awesome that happened a few weeks ago
May 9, 2012
6 Ideas for Sensible Homes
Small, supportive, affordable, recycled—and you can build your own.
Ella Jenkins is building the home of her dreams. It has pine floors and a yellow front door. And it’s 130 square feet, mobile, and currently sitting in her parents’ yard.
Jenkins, 23, is building her little house with the help of her stepdad after years living in college dorm rooms and couch surfing while she studied music in Scotland. She knew her degree in Scottish harp music and Gaelic singing would not be especially marketable, and she found Southern California rent to be “staggeringly high.” “I could not support myself doing what I want to do when I need to pay rent,” she says.
April 27, 2012
April 27, 2012
International Conference on Degrowth in the Americas 2012 - Montreal
Twenty years after the Earth Summit in Rio, the linkage of sustainable development to economic growth requires profound rethinking. It has not offered a convincing solution to one of the most dramatic crises in history: how to avert ecological collapse while enhancing social justice and improving life’s prospects. In advance of Rio plus 20, our Conference seeks to challenge and move beyond the sustainable development agenda. A degrowth perspective will help us visualize and build towards a truly prosperous world.
Drawing from previous degrowth conferences in Paris and Barcelona in 2008 and 2010 respectively, the Montreal conference will focus on the particular situations and dynamics of the Americas. What does degrowth mean for our Hemisphere with its rich geographical, cultural, social and economic diversity? How can degrowth models apply to different contexts from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego? What does degrowth mean for the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their aspirations for their lands and peoples? How can degrowth concepts be made audible, understandable and acceptable to rich North Americans?
This gathering will bring together academics, activists, environmentalists and indigenous peoples to discuss our needs and hopes for diverse and more equitable societies in the Americas, on a post-growth healing earth.
April 24, 2012
April 24, 2012
“Occupy the Farm” coalition takes over land tract near Berkeley to feed local community
from Deep Green Resistance News Service
“Under the banner “Occupy the Farm,” a coalition of local residents, farmers, students, researchers, and activists broke the lock and entered the UC Berkeley-owned Gill Tract on a sunny Sunday afternoon, bringing with them over 15,000 seedlings, a pair of rototillers and a half-dozen chickens in mobile chicken-tractors. Hundreds of people, including a dozen or so children, went to work clearing weeds, tilling garden beds, filling holes with compost, and planting seedlings. At the end of four hours, they’d planted an estimated three-quarters of an acre.
The Gill Tract, an agricultural research plot owned by UC Berkeley, is the last five acres of Class 1 soil in the East Bay. Generations of UC researchers have farmed here; now UCB Capital Projects, which holds the title to the land, has slated it for rezoning in 2013. Ironically, the activists say the company most likely to buy it up for development is Whole Foods Corporation. Hence the Occupiers’ slogan: “Whole food, not Whole Foods.” “
April 21, 2012
There is an alternative: participatory economics
In this interview, Michael Albert — co-founder of Znet — reflects on the vision of participatory economics, and how it could take us beyond capitalism.
April 19, 2012
Milk Not Jails: Building a new urban-rural alliance in New York
What do dairy and drug policy reform have in common? Working together, the two could fuel renewal that mutually benefits urban and rural communities — or so think the folks at Milk Not Jails, a “volunteer-run, grassroots campaign working to build a new urban-rural alliance in New York State.” The group’s founders have made the connection between urban blight — particularly the massive numbers of low-level drug arrests that create cycles of recidivism, unemployment, and crime in already-impoverished minority communities — and rural blight tied to the struggle of family farms to stay afloat as agriculture is consolidated and corporatized and farmland is gobbled up by sprawl. For down-on-their-heels communities in upstate New York — like for rural towns in every state — the war on drugs has been an economic boon, as the need for more prisons to contain skyrocketing numbers of nonviolent drug offenders brings vital jobs to areas once supported by agriculture.
RSS feed: http://thecommunes.tumblr.com/rss
1 of 10
Next page
