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Transformation

Welcome To ‘Think Like A Commoner’

March 1, 2025 David Bollier. , , ,
About a year ago, some folks in Bangkok reached out to me. Hans van Willenswaard and his wife Wallapa wanted to translate my book Think Like a Commoner into Thai and publish it. Hans is the founder of the Innovation Network International in Thailand, and his wife Wallapa is a social entrepreneur and founder of the Mindful Markets movement. Both have been quite involved in the commons for some time. I was thrilled by their request, but upon re-reading the original version of my book, published in 2014, I was dismayed to realize that parts of it felt outdated.

Clean Waters And Green Mountains As Valuable As Gold And Silver Mountains

February 14, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , , ,
Lost in a colonial fog of inferiority, writers across Asia imagined a world that was beyond the reach of colonialism’s devastation. In 1835, Kylas Chunder Dutt (1817–1859) wrote a remarkable story called ‘A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945’; the story, published in The Calcutta Literary Gazette, came out when the great French science fiction novelist Jules Verne (1828–1905) was only seven years old. Dutt’s account is not strictly science fiction, but largely futuristic. The eighteen-year-old opened his story with this line: ‘The people of India and particularly those of the metropolis had been subject for the last fifty years to every species of subaltern oppression. … With the rapidity of lightning the spirit of Rebellion spread through this once pacific people’.

Inside The Rise And Fall Of Hester Street

January 18, 2025 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. , , ,
Right where Manhattan’s Chinatown and Lower East Side start fading into each other, the below-grade garden-style storefront that Hester Street Collaborative called home for most of its existence was constantly awash in color. Post-its everywhere. Whiteboards, easel pad paper stuck up on walls, covered in handwritten notes. Giant print-outs summarizing community input for building redesigns or neighborhood rezonings. Artwork made onsite by students from the middle school across the street, who came for workshops or just to hang out.

Multisolving: Creating Systems Change In A Fractured World

December 16, 2024 Elizabeth Sawin, Resilience. , , ,
"Some years ago, my colleagues and I began studying interventions that solve multiple problems at the same time. We found them everywhere, at both neighborhood and national scales and in every country we looked. We found them across sectors: in urban planning, health, agriculture, forestry, energy, transportation, and disaster management. On the surface, these projects were all quite different, and the people undertaking them certainly didn’t think of themselves as using any special methodology. Still, we found that the projects had much in common with each other." It would be helpful, we thought, to find a word that would categorize these diverse projects. It seemed to us that they had much to learn from each other and much to teach the world. We couldn’t find any word in use that quite captured these approaches and their potential impacts. So, we began to use the word multisolving.

Try Imagining Another Urban Existence

November 23, 2024 David Graeber - Nika Dubrovsky, Counter Punch. , , ,
In thousands of ways, we are taught to accept the world we live in as the only possible one, but thousands of other ways of organizing homes, cities, schools, societies, economies, and cosmologies have existed and could exist. We started a project called Made Differently: designed to play with the possibility and to overcome the suspicion—instilled in us every day—that life is limited, miserable, and boring. Our first focus is Cities Made Differently, exploring different ways of living together. Read and imagine four different kinds of cities taken from our book which are listed below, and continue your exploration, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.

Political And Climate Storms Rolling In

November 18, 2024 Patrick Mazza, Resilience. , , ,
Never has it been more important to build strong places capable of weathering the storms barreling down on us, both the physical storms of a disrupted climate and the political, social and economic storms of a nation and world tumbling into increasing conflict. Never has it been more crucial to strengthen and build the community networks and institutions that promote human solidarity. Donald Trump’s election to his second presidential term sends that message loud and clear. Though things weren’t exactly going great before the election.

Historical Block Conference Proposals To Help Economic Transformation

November 17, 2024 María Eugenia Rodríguez, Orinoco Tribune. , , , ,
The vice president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, reported that the proposals coming out of the Great Congress of the Bolivarian Historical Block will help in the construction of the economic transformation program that Venezuela requires. During her speech at the opening ceremony of the Congress, Thursday, November 15, at the Convention Center in Simón Bolívar Park in La Carlota, Caracas, the Venezuelan vice president also highlighted the over 100 proposals that had been submitted. “I welcome these more than 100 proposals that have been raised … because they will help us to build the economic transformation program that Venezuela needs, in order to become a powerful country,” she said.

Our Revolutions Are For The Survival And Development Of Human Civilisation

October 25, 2024 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. , , , ,
Next year is the seventieth anniversary of the Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 and attended by heads of government and state from twenty-nine African and Asian countries. Indonesia’s President Sukarno (1901–1970), who had led the freedom movement in Indonesia against Dutch colonialism, opened the conference with a speech entitled ‘Let a New Asia and a New Africa be Born!’, in which he lamented that, while human technical and scientific progress had advanced, the politics of the world remained in a state of disarray.

Your Mind Is A Battlefield: Decolonize It To Prevent Global Catastrophe!

October 2, 2024 K. J. Noh, Popular Resistance. , , , , ,
It's a great honor for me to join you in this extraordinary, historical moment of celebration and reflection on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. As has been said, we are seeing changes unseen in a century.  Changes both great and terrible. We are currently seeing the unravelling of Empire--and its last desperate, violent, hideous death rattle. We are seeing the unmasking of 500 years of western "civilization", and the laying bare of its hypocrisy and unspeakable brutality. We are seeing the true face of capitalist imperialism, not its made up public relations face, but its resting bastard face. It's not pretty. One of the precipitating factors of the end of Empire--not the only one, but a very important one, because it allows countries to resist hegemony together--is the rise of China.

Why Transition? And Why Now?

September 12, 2024 Chris McCartney, Resilience. , , ,
There is a lot to keep us awake at night. War, signs of environmental collapse, rising inequality. Then there’s the countless personal daily worries demanding our attention – bills; stressful work; children and elders needing support; getting the healthcare we need. It can be an overwhelming mix, inducing anxiety and making our world feel unstable and insecure. Burying your head in the sand, and narrowing your focus to what you can control in your own household or shopping basket seems like a perfectly rational response. Then this summer, many communities were rocked by racist violence and protests, and a wave of community mobilisations saying everyone is welcome.

What Would A Real Renewable Energy Transition Look Like?

August 22, 2024 Richard Heinberg, Resilience. , , ,
Humanity’s transition from relying overwhelmingly on fossil fuels to instead using alternative low-carbon energy sources is sometimes said to be unstoppable and exponential. A boosterish attitude on the part of many renewable energy advocates is understandable: overcoming people’s climate despair and sowing confidence could help muster the needed groundswell of motivation to end our collective fossil fuel dependency. But occasionally a reality check is in order. The reality is that energy transitions are a big deal, and they typically take centuries to unfold. Historically, they’ve been transformative for societies—whether we’re speaking of humanity’s taming of fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, or our adoption of fossil fuels starting roughly 200 years ago.

Introduction To DES: Solidarity Economy Districts

August 12, 2024 Tamat, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
In today's video, we bring you an in-depth interview with representatives from the Verona Solidarity Economy District (DES). We will discover how the movement started, its roots in the Lilliput network in Varese, and how it has grown over the years to become an established reality in the field of solidarity economy. Topics covered in the video: - The origins of the DES: The history of the movement, from its early steps taken over 20 years ago thanks to the Lilliput network, to the founding of the DES in Varese and Verona. - The Lilliput network and the G8: How awareness of global dynamics, such as those of the G8, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, influenced the birth of the DES.

If This Is Us At 20, What Could We Be At 40?

June 14, 2024 Michael Johnson, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
My main work over the past 44 years has been about figuring out how we can consciously develop democracy all over this country. This has included 16 years of active involvement with the cooperative/solidarity economic movements. I believe that bringing this developmental perspective to the cooperative movement can be a rich and productive way for celebrating the 20th birthday of the USFWC. I have two suggestions for consciously growing the worker co-op movement, which naturally reach beyond to the whole cooperative economic movement. The first is to make full use of both Eleanor Ostrom's work and the wisdom emerging from the field of cultural evolution.

The Climate Crisis Is Directly Related To Inequality

May 31, 2024 Diane Bernard, DeSmog. , , ,
In an interview with Rachel Donald of the podcast Planet: Critical, science historian Naomi Oreskes spoke about her new book, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, cowritten with Erik M. Conway. She explored why our climate is in crisis, detailing how institutions, lobbyists, and corporations continue to undermine democracy; and why a renewable world threatens the powers that be. Ultimately, Oreskes points out that the climate crisis is not a scientific problem, but a political, economic, and social issue. Oreskes is a professor at Harvard University who co-authored the bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, and has written nearly 200 scholarly papers and popular articles.

How Working For Place-Based Solutions Can Change The World

May 28, 2024 Patrick Mazza, Resilience. , , ,
In a world of onrushing crises, where the level of change required to meet them boggles the mind, even as too many trends are moving in the wrong direction, questions of “What will be enough?” and “Can it come soon enough?” surge to the foreground. There must be a place to begin grappling with the complex questions of societal transformation. A place to grab hold and gain enough leverage to begin making fundamental changes. That place is the communities and bioregions where we live. We must begin to build the future in place. Clearly we are over the line ecologically, as the planetary boundaries study I recently covered underscores.
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