Dileswari, who is earning praise from locals for her dedication during the lockdown, underpins the importance of education and why it cannot wait till the schools reopen Balangir, Odisha: At…
Who is “we”? We humans have made a mess of things, which is readily evident if we face the avalanche of studies and statistics describing the contemporary ecological crises we face. But even with the…
The real downside of the green-profit narrative has been that it created the assumption in many people's minds that the solution to climate change and other environmental dilemmas is technical,…
What does civilization stand for and what it has produced over its four to five thousand years of its existence. In Western Europe from the earliest civilised times those societies…
I am adamant about this topic. I know that the only way forward is to limit ourselves in resource and energy use. In that vein, I wrote to the USA…
As we pick up the pieces of the shattered economy, the route to the Great Transition becomes clear: we need to recapture and democratize money as a lever for resource…
Root Cause: I don't know if it is right to attribute this to the education system and societal values but the most important thing that is sought after in life…
By Vivek Sinha, Parijat Ghosh, Dibyendu Chaudhuri Introduction Sukanti Oraon of Jana, a village in Gumla district of Jharkhand, clearly remembers the day her Self Help Group (SHG) was formed.…
In a recent committee meeting at my institution, I heard a colleague say: “Our job is to prepare students for the world.” This comment wasn’t intended as an earth-shaking revelation,…
In the first article of Crisis Management, discussing the solutions “Adopt a Village” was an idea shared. This thought is not just for doing social service but also to improve…
Co-Written by Bibhubanta Barad. Parijat Ghosh and Dibyendu Chaudhuri Introduction It was a sunny summer morning in 2017. Self Help Group (SHG) members of Jana[1] congregated beneath the tamarind tree,…
Co-Written by Emily Kawano and Julie Matthaei The COVID-19 pandemic has upended our world. It has laid bare the inequity, the limits, and the failures of capitalism. The door to…
Senior activist Medha Patkar launched a youth led, Towards A Better World campaign, in an online session where several youth leaders of Fridays For Future (a global movement led by…
Since the 1960s, how many movements have excitedly exploded into existence, only to later morbidly melt away? In contrast, how many movements have constantly interminably grown and strengthened over time?…
Kenneth E Boulding, an English-American economist and an interdisciplinary philosopher once said; “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or…
According to statistics from the World Health Organisation, the number of coronavirus cases being reported worldwide remains significant. For example, in the 24-hours between 9th and 10th July, over 200,000…
Ambassador Lamberto Zannier of Italy took up the mandate of OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities on 19 July 2017. Before taking up the position of High Commissioner, Zannier was…
On a visit to Barcelona last week, I learned a great deal about the City’s pioneering role in developing "the city as a commons." I also learned that crystallizing a…
Can there be a collective search for paradigms and pathways towards a world that is sustainable, equitable and just? How can such frameworks and visions build on an existing…
I’d been hoping to pay another visit to the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex, but red tape has been holding me up at the border so it’ll have to wait probably…
We are only gradually beginning to realize that global common-pool resources are assets to humankind that should be managed as commons. Wasting them would be disastrous. We are trustees of…
Buen Vivir is a proposal aimed at making visible and expressible aspects of reality that are ignored by the dominant paradigm. It is a proposal from a radical and spiritual…
The truth is we don’t know. We pretend that we can continue to dodge the mass terrors like the one a generation ago, where we eluded a nuclear annihilation. It…
The legalization of setting up a Community Radio Station came after a long and voiced revolution from various grass-root organizations, individuals and communities. Community Radio is not just something which…
Introduction With characteristic insight, the great American philosopher, John Dewey, once wrote: ‘Every generation has to accomplish democracy over again for itself.’[1] His point was that, at each moment in history,…
The current state of American politics must make us question whether any of our leaders in the Beltway can be described as “grown-ups”, i.e., fully mature and sane individuals. Between…
Cuba has come a long way since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the loss of imports crucial for the island nation’s industrial agriculture system—such as chemical pesticides and…
Land and people have suffered together, as invariably they must. Under the rule of industrial economics, the land, our country, has been pillaged for the enrichment, supposedly, of those humans…
“If we say that money comes from ecological function instead from extraction, manufacturing buying and selling, then we have a system in which all human efforts go toward restoring, protecting…
New alternative and complementary currencies are a growing worldwide trend, and many states in the US have created their own local curriencies. Our local alternative currency, the Hudson Valley Current,…
Emilia Romagna, a region with nearly 4.5 million people whose capital is the medieval university city of Bologna, has one of the densest cooperative economies in the world. About two…
Co-Written by Richard Heinberg, David Fridley Ed. note: This is Chapter 10 of Richard Heinberg's and David Fridley's new book, Our Renewable Future, now available from Island Press. Post Carbon…
The Brexit earthquake, possibly the biggest since the 2008 financial collapse, provides another opportunity to question the economic and political structures that cause such quakes. I’ve heard only a handful…
With climate change, resource limits, and secular stagnation, this make-believe “resolution of real contradictions” reveals itself as clearly “imaginary.” Consequently, in order to dismantle the hegemony of growth, degrowth has…
There’s a good reason (actually, 30 good reasons covered here, plus at least 90 others to be discussed in later issues) why no-one has been able to come up with…
Hilary Wainwright, of the Transnational Institute and co-editor of Red Pepper magazine, made a lasting impression on the Commons Transition/P2P Foundation team with her panel presentation at the recent Commons…
It’s been three years now of food shortages, inflation, and queues in Venezuela, and the millions of people involved in community and movement organizing have been the most affected. But…
The food waste debate has gone mainstream. People at every level from individual consumers to national governments are beginning to pay attention to the issues which lead to a third…
An equal level of consumption for everyone around the world at the level of today's Cuba offers the possibility of substantially lowering human impact on the biosphere while at the…
In India, economic development and modernity have transformed livelihoods into deadlihoods. They are wiping out millennia-old livelihoods that were ways of life with no sharp division between work and…
Like many of the grand schemes hatched in the wake of the 2007-2008 food price spikes, this one was a bust, by any measure. Still, ProSAVANA remains the Mozambican government’s…
A proverb of the indigenous people of southwestern Colombia warns: “The word without action is empty, action without the word is blind, and action and the word outside the spirit…
The equity and justice questions won’t go away. From the perspective of global elites, something must be done to level the playing field and take everyone’s interests into account (whether…
Ed. note: This is the introduction to Richard Heinberg's and David Fridley's new book, Our Renewable Future, now available from Island Press. Post Carbon Institute's companion website, ourrenewablefuture.org has also…
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