Although systemic economic forces make it difficult for anyone to survive as a farmer — and even harder to acquire enough land to start a farm — institutional racism and other forms of discrimination have made it all but impossible for people of color. That’s why Soul Fire Farm, a people of color led community farm near Albany, New York , has launched a project meant to deal with the lasting effects of discrimination in a way that both empowers POC farmers to grow the food their communities … [Read more...]
Mending a History of Discrimination through “Person-to-Person Reparations”
Bulldoze the Business School
Visit the average university campus and it is likely that the newest and most ostentatious building will be occupied by the business school. The business school has the best building because it makes the biggest profits (or, euphemistically, “contribution” or “surplus”) – as you might expect, from a form of knowledge that teaches people how to make profits.Business schools have huge influence, yet they are also widely regarded to be intellectually fraudulent places, fostering a culture of … [Read more...]
Can ‘Localism’ Restore Sanity to Politics?
I live in one of those old towns that was not built for cars. Its Main Street is narrow, hedged in with historic stone houses and walls. As commuter traffic has intensified over the past several years, it’s become increasingly dangerous to walk along Main Street.The mayor of my tiny Virginia town has worked incessantly to fix this, by fostering walkability and traffic-calming measures since he ran for town council in the 1990s. I’m determined to help him: I want to walk with my daughter to … [Read more...]
Localization: a strategic alternative to globalized authoritarianism
For those who care about peace, equality and the future of the planet, the global political swing to the right over the past few years is deeply worrying. It has us asking ourselves, how did this happen? How did populism turn into such a divisive and destructive force? How did authoritarianism take over the political scene once again?From my 40 years of experience working in both industrialized and land-based cultures, I believe the primary reason is globalization. When I say globalization, … [Read more...]
Cooking fresh for the planet
How often do you cook a meal from scratch? For 11% of British people, the answer is never. But subsisting entirely on processed food and ready meals is not only bad for your health, it is also bad for the planet. It makes little sense financially, either: it is cheaper to create a meal using whole foods and fresh ingredients than it is to buy a substandard supermarket version. Eating well shouldn’t be a luxury reserved for the well-off, everyone can do it: it is part of the Economics of … [Read more...]
The Curse of Bigness
The next time I hear a politico or banker or corporate executive talk about institutions “too big to fail,” I’ll direct them to the 34 percent of Americans who are obese. Last I heard, these big Americans, themselves a kind of cultural institution, were failing en masse, racked by diabetes, asthma, heart trouble, and bound for early death. The human form can only grow so big. Or I could point them to Pig #6707. Conceived in the laboratories of the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the 1990s, … [Read more...]
Local Finance Made Simple
The nature of money is to abstract value. That is its role. It stands in place of an actual good or service.If I fail to have the basket of potatoes you are seeking in exchange for the wool from your sheep, I can instead pay for the wool in dollars or BerkShares or Brixton Pounds— which then become an abstract representation of the wool. You can then exchange those $, B$, or B£ at a later time in the market for potatoes, or for any number of other products or services.This capacity for … [Read more...]
Facebook: Making Us Dumber
It’s even worse than I feared.I got rid of my Facebook account in 2013, less for my own sake than for what my presence on the service was doing to others. I knew that anyone who “liked” my page could have their data harvested in ways they wouldn’t necessarily approve.Over the past five years, people have not only become aware of this devil’s bargain but accepted it as the internet’s price of admission. “So what if they have my data,” I saw a graduate student ask her professor this week. … [Read more...]
CTRLshift: An Emergency Summit for Change
In Britain, these days, all the essential endeavors that are supposed to promote general wellbeing and what is known as “civilization” are, it is widely agreed, in crisis: health and social services; housing; education; energy; transport; and of course, though successive governments haven’t taken it seriously, agriculture. Oh yes, and then there’s “the environment” – nothing less than the biosphere; nature; the living world — but commonly thought of these days as real estate or “natural capital” … [Read more...]
Where Time Went (and why we have so little left)
“Sleeker. Faster. More Intuitive” (The New York Times); “Welcome to a world where speed is everything” (Verizon FiOS); “Speed is God, and time is the devil” (chief of Hitachi’s portable-computer division). In “real” time, life speeds up until time itself seems to disappear—fast is never fast enough, everything has to be done now, instantly. To pause, delay, stop, slow down is to miss an opportunity and to give an edge to a competitor. Speed has become the measure of success—faster chips, faster … [Read more...]