Planetary Boundaries—Governing Emerging Risks And Opportunities
The notion of planetary boundaries can be seen as a way to frame governance reform. This discussion introduces key elements of governance in a world with boundaries: deep reform of…
Counter Solutions
Feminism And The Politics Of The Commons
Reproduction precedes social production. Touch the women, touch the rock. 1 – Peter Linebaugh At least since the Zapatistas took over the zócalo in San Cristobal de las Casas on…
First Thoughts For A Phenomenology Of The Commons
The commons are not concessions. They are resources that belong to the people as a matter of life necessity. Everybody has a right of an equal share of the commons…
The Structural Communality Of The Commons
The commons are as varied as life itself, and yet everyone involved with them shares common convictions. If we wish to understand these convictions, we must realize what commons mean…
Institutions And Trust In Commons: Dealing With Social Dilemmas
From a game-theoretic point of view, commons represent both a chance and a problem. Game-theory is a mathematical tool that allows us to analyze decision-making in situations with social interdependencies…
Resilience Thinking
Resilience: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks. The UK Low Carbon…
Farm Hack: A Commons For Agricultural Innovation
In 2011, a community of farmers, designers, developers, engineers, architects, roboticists and open source thinkers came together in Boston, Massachusetts, to explore a simple yet radical idea – that great…
We Are Not Born As Egoists
A woman is writing a letter, and her pen drops to the floor. She leans across the desk and tries to pick it up, but she can’t reach it. A…
CIC’s Autonomous Projects Of Collective Initiative #5: Calafou
One of the most interesting autonomous projects associated with the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) is Calafou, the self-proclaimed “post-capitalist colony” which settled in 2011 in the ruins of an abandoned…
Efficiency And The Commons
Efficiency is the spiritual practice of the religion of scientific management. Under its spell, we have not only privatized once abundant shared natural resources, but we have also privatized our…
The Economy Of Wastefulness: The Biology Of The Commons
There is an all-enclosing commons-economy which has been successful for billions of years: the biosphere. Its ecology is the terrestrial household of energy, matter, beings, relationships and meanings which contains…
My Rocky Road To The Commons
“The Pyrenees, they are not all that high up – their outlines are gently curved, sharp ridges few and far between, and all the peaks are rounded. It seems like…
Degrowth Meets Convivialism: Pathways To A Convivial Society
The concept of convivialism has attracted some attention in recent years. When giving it a closer look – even superficially – it soon reveals its proximity to the degrowth concept and movement. But…
John D. Liu On Regenerative Ecology And Naturalized Economies
“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…
State Power And Commoning: Transcending A Problematic Relationship
What changes in state power must occur for commoning to flourish as a legal form of self-provisioning and governance? What does the success of the commons imply for the future…
Why “Bad Cops” Are Not The Real Issue
I'm hoping these comments will bring some analysis to 5 seemingly innocuous but misguided words: "Not all cops are bad" and "good cops versus bad cops". If you're in the…
Keep It Local! The Complementary Currency Alternative
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,…
The Commons As The Response To The Structural Crises Of The Global System
The Connecting the Dots series has convincingly shown a number of interconnected reasons why the global system is in crisis, and why there is no way out without a structural…
From Ecology To Education
Politics in many ways has become a bully boy gimmick. One has to read beyond headlines and think of deeper processes and consequences. One such event was the recent cabinet…
The Italian Region Where Co-ops Produce A Third Of Its GDP
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…
What We As A People Can Do
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…
Another Exit Strategy?
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…
Undoing The Ideology Of Growth
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…
30 Ways Cities Can Prepare For Global Warming
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…
Feminist Socialism And The Commons
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…
In Venezuela’s Difficult Times The Grassroots Are Stronger
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…
Another Side To Food Waste
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…
Equality And Sustainability: Can We Have Both?
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…
From Livelihoods To Deadlihoods
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…
Mozambique: Looking For Food In All The Wrong Places
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…
Beyond Development: The Commons As A New/Old Paradigm Of Human Flourishing
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…
Energy And Justice
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…
The Case For The Green State
Critiques of the modern nation-state have been growing in recent decades, due to the abysmal failures of the capitalist, neoliberal order. In particular, conservative-libertarian arguments are tinged with isolationist and…
This Is Where The Jobs Are!
Diminshing Employment opportunities There is a popular story about a journalist being taken around a modern process industry that is fully automated. The factory owner proudly announces that whole process…
After A Century In Decline, Black Farmers Are Back And On the Rise
These Black farmers don’t stop at healthy food. They’re healing trauma, instilling collective values, and changing the way their communities think about the land.
Viva la Producción! Urban Farming In Cuba
Urban farming has gained momentum in recent years as a result of increased awareness of environmental issues and the desire to feed people living in cities sustainably. For Cuba in…
The Radical Work Of Healing: Fania And Angela Davis On A New Kind Of Civil Rights Activism
Angela and Fania Davis. YES! Photo by Kristin Little. Angela Davis and her sister Fania Davis were working for social justice before many of today’s activists were born. From their…
Our Renewable Future
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…
Pathways Of Transition To Agroecological Food Systems
A new report by leading sustainability experts has reaffirmed the case for a paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems – fundamental to which is a call for…
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