Localization
From Hollowed-Out Communities to Resilient Local Economies
A Far North Response to Global Fragility Across the Far North of New Zealand, there is a growing sense that something fundamental has been lost. Towns that once supported thriving local economies now struggle to retain young people. Main streets have emptied and small farms have disappeared. Locally owned businesses have been replaced by distant…
Read MoreThe Crisis of Globalization and the Search for Alternatives
Moving towards genuine self-reliance in times of war and climate collapse. The world is reeling from the crises generated by the war in the Gulf, the disastrous climate and ecological collapse, deepening inequalities, genocides, and other mass atrocities. Multilateral institutions like the United Nations appear to be unable to do much about these. Like any…
Read MoreLiving Connected to Place and Why It Matters Now
Over time, I’ve come to realize that downturns in my mood are often related to feeling disconnected. Maybe I’ve been working hard and not paying as much attention to my family or not seeing friends. I may be talking with others on Zoom, but it’s not the same felt sense of connection as being together…
Read MoreRooted in Place
What Farmers’ Markets Teach Us About Relocalization, Food Sovereignty, and Public Spaces The Broken Food System We’re Facing The longer I work in the local food world, the less I mince my words. From farmers to consumers, the globalized industrial food system is failing many of the people it’s meant to serve. The author posing…
Read MoreJune 21 – World Localization Day
Ever since 2020, a global organization called Local Futures has been organizing events in dozens of countries on June 21, when the planet’s northern hemisphere enters the summer solstice. There are films, webinars, and local events happening everywhere around the globe. And it’s a moment when all of us who feel isolated in our localist…
Read MoreGo Back and Fetch It: Sankofa and the Cult of Progress
Last year, I was one of an international throng of localists (yes, international localists) to descend on Bristol, UK. We were there for the Planet Local Summit – perhaps the largest gathering of this movement to date. It was as if everyone I’d ever read or listened to on a podcast or seen in a…
Read MoreA Tale of Localization in Two Cities
After spending 30 years in Asia (mostly Bangladesh), I have recently begun spending most of my time in the small city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Going from a megacity of roughly 22 million people to a city of merely 90,000, relocating from the tropics to the desert, the differences are obviously staggering. But what…
Read MoreA Localized Alternative to ‘Disaster Capitalism’
Like many disasters, Covid-19 shocked the world; like some disasters it changed the world economy in ways most of us did not predict. But let’s back up for moment. What if those post-disaster changes had indeed been predicted – planned even – by people long before the virus began its deadly spread? More than a…
Read MoreBicycles and Localization
World Celebration Days are ways to highlight a cause, to collectively focus and bring important ideas to public attention at the community level while uniting globally behind them. Several important days were packed into the month of June. These included World Bicycle Day, followed two days later by World Environment Day, and then World Localization…
Read MoreActive Networks for a Rapid Global-to-Local Transition
It’s too easy to get depressed by the daily news cycle of wars and the threat of A.I., and to assume that nothing at all is going on to take the world in a more life-affirming direction. The truth is, there are thousands of grassroots projects on every continent challenging the bigger-is-better, high-tech trajectory of…
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