Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Going local is remembering the old ways, the ways in which all our ancestors used to live. Going local is about reconnecting to place, people and self. It is the ultimate reconnection our planet is calling for. A slower pace and more gentle way of being on this planet.
It’s clear that livin’ isn’t a solo act, for it involves at least a community of people consciously acting to create and sustain for themselves a total living community.
At a time when the spaces we inhabit determine our chances to survive a deadly virus, it is crucial to challenge canonical urban planning and its deep failures in the Global South.
Such transformation can go much further than cutting emissions, drawing down carbon or simple adaptations. It can even go beyond changing our mindsets. It could transform what I call our “heart-set”, so that whatever comes next, we will face it with an unwavering and universal love.
What can help us move in the direction of a genuine social emancipation is not the passive belonging to a certain social stratum, be it economic or other, but the active stance and praxis in everyday life.
This impulse toward activism is the sound of love when it roars–when it demands to be heard. The universal is deeply personal.
Now that we have glimpsed for the first time a planet-wide threat to all that lives and breathes, we might acknowledge at long last that we have been poorly served by a mode of understanding that must turn everything into the same kind of lock – the same mechanism – before it can proceed.
Even if you do take this study’s results at face value, it’s a stretch to interpret its major takeaway as, “Most Americans don’t want walkable places.”
I’ve taken it upon myself to project a small farm future, not to produce some social blueprint of appropriate living arrangements as determined by myself.
I want to create a movement of families and communities who have these kinds of strong bonds, better health, greater happiness, and more self-sufficiency. I want people to come together to increase the value and meaning in their own lives.
The climate chaos that we are witnessing makes it inescapably clear that dominating others harms oneself, and that this system of domination will inevitably end—whether through ecological disasters or our collective action.
Gordon says that there are no shortcuts around the amount of work involved in this model of community engagement. “You’re building relationships, building trust.”
