In Search of the Metrics of the Imagination
Disaster stalks us. The news seems to about nothing else. Serial killers, poisoned food and new “Super Bug” viruses are today’s headlines as I scan the internet. In our personal lives, lost opportunities for education, employment or, worst of all, intimate relations abound.
Last year, a compilation of degrowth perspectives appeared in the form of a modest encyclopedia of sorts, titled Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. The short essays in this book define a number of degrowth-related terms, some easily recognized as universal concepts familiar to activists across the world, like the commons, environmental justice, and peak-oil, and others that may puzzle: conviviality, anti-utilitarianism, and post-normal science.
“No modern solutions to modern problems” – B dS Santos
Hardly a week goes by without another dire warning about climate change. Whether the alarm comes from a university, an animal protection outfit, a human rights NGO or an intrepid TV journalist warily broadcasting in the front of a melting iceberg, their message of impending catastrophe hardly registers amongst the other debilitating news of terrorist bombings and police violence.
It’s a warm Monday morning in June. 7:15 a.m. and I am waiting for the bus to take me to my first job. I just graduated high school and my father discouraged me working during school or even during the summer breaks.
FOCUS: Why don’t we start with a little background on you personally and the team you are with? Just some general statements that we can begin to explore in more depth.
Jorda Tivva: Given what we do, maybe I should start by saying that all my life I have been intrigued by cities and this is true of most of the team.
Pre-industrial European societies, for the most part, didn’t conceive of time in the abstract as a scarce commodity that indicated when to work and when not, but as an elastic measure embedded in social relations. The seasons determined work: as daylight waned in winter so too did toil.
Book Review of COLLECTIVE COURAGE: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought And Practice – Jessica Gordon Nembhard (Penn State University Press 2014)
“Courage,” Ella Baker said, in 1931, to a phalanx of young African American co-operators gathered in Pittsburgh.
Beyond Localism
Occupy was a rarity in America – an explicitly “post-political” movement. It was not your textbook rebellion. No manifesto! No demands! No Villa, no Lennon, no Malcolm X to lead the masses, just a messy, somewhat incoherent, but ultimately a critical and joyful experience – until the truncheons, gas, rubber bullets, and all arrived.
In Response to Grist’s “Real Sharing” Economy
The idea here is to subvert consumerism by real sharing and in so doing create a better quality of life, beyond the notion that material scarcity rules, to develop in its place social practices that cultivate meaningful relationships, so to retrieve, or discover, our unique creative outlets.