Posts Tagged ‘happiness’
What If the Future Is Emerging Where Development Rarely Looks?
Recently, I participated in the National Gathering of the Movimento Futuro Local (Local Futures Movement) in São Paulo, facilitating a conversation on cooperation, collaboration, and territorial networks alongside leaders I deeply admire, including Thiago Vinicius, whose work has helped broaden discussions on urban peripheries, territorial justice, and community leadership in Brazil. Throughout the conversations, one…
Read MoreNurturing A Living Future
In the autumn of 2024 I spent most of a week with a set of remarkable women in Devon, England. Organized by Local Futures leader, Helena Norberg-Hodge (with assistance), our interdisciplinary group spent a day planning and then gave a daylong workshop and evening session to about 100, mostly women, participants. The focus was on…
Read MoreHope is a Muscle: What Keeps Us Going, Year After Year
2025 marks fifty years since Local Futures’ story started high on the Tibetan Plateau, inspired by the traditional culture of Ladakh and what it could teach a globalizing world. Over those fifty years, much has changed in the world – and much for the worse. Cultures, languages, species and ecosystems have been lost. Political moments…
Read MoreEmbracing Sub-Optimal Relationships
By many measures, it would seem that we are not okay, and, more specifically, that the kids are not, in fact, alright.(1) These measures include rates of isolation, loneliness, unhappiness, self-harm, burnout, anxiety, depression, etc. I am not a social scientist, but, as best as I can judge, the findings are well-attested, and they are…
Read MoreThe Caravan of Hope: Uncovering a Localising Japan
To many, Japan is a poster child of globalisation. With its commercial boom and bustling megacities, it’s a vision in neon, characterised by high technology, consumerism, and ruthless capitalist competition. But fissures in the country’s modernising dream run deep: rising poverty, environmental decline, food insecurity, and, infamously, an epidemic of youth suicide and depression that…
Read MoreThe Abundance of Subsistence
One late-summer day, a day so hot the mosquitoes weren’t flying, my brother and his wife and I traveled nine miles up the Unalakleet River to seine for humpies, or pink salmon. We laughed and hollered while pulling the net to a flat, wide bar made of perfect skipping and throwing stones at the inside…
Read MoreRethinking Technology and the Good Society
Despite suffering from debilitating headaches and generally poor health, Weil completed her work during a remarkable burst of activity. She died later that year at the age of 34. The report was published in 1949. The first English translation appeared in 1952 as The Need for Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind.…
Read MoreHumility and the myth of limitlessness
I might be wrong about this, but it seems that over the last couple of years more and more people have been working their way to the conclusion that modern society is fundamentally broken – not just broken in a way that can be fixed with a little tinkering here and there, but somehow broken…
Read MoreLocalization and Buen Vivir
Today, there exists what in my estimation is an unprecedented moment for altering the course of human history. The hopes and dreams for a more equitable, peaceful, just and livable world now have an opening for their realization as never before, which has come about due to the impacts on society from accelerating climate fluctuations…
Read MoreArt as Activism: an interview with Brenna Quinlan
Brenna Quinlan’s passions are art, sustainability and education, and she combines these three into what she calls ‘Art as Activism’. Having lived and worked on permaculture sites around the world, her drawings convey the power of permaculture and localization principles, and act as powerful tools for environmental and social justice movements. She created the illustrations…
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