Contemporary urban housing has become an economic and environmental mess, a festering problem forever dodging solutions. Anitra Nelson explores the way out of the crisis and discusses the role cohousing could play in rejuvenating the urban space.
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As grassroots solutions to the current neoliberal orthodoxy emerge all around us, it is important to figure out a way to make them physically accessible for people. Emily Nicolosi writes about the Utah Resilience Map, a path breaking effort putting alternatives emerging in and around Salt Lake City on a map. It’s a bold initiative which challenges the stranglehold of corporate online mapping and an emerging template for replication at other places.
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The Kickapoo River valley in Wisconsin, USA was condemned to reckless “development” in the 1970s as a mega-dam flood control project got underway. But that move was met with resistance from the Ho-Chunk people who consider the area their sacred homeland. Paul Robbins and Marcy West recount the powerful story of a community led and focused ecological revival of the Kickapoo valley, underscoring the triumph of negotiations and collaboration over mistrust and fear.
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Ashish Kothari was recently on a book tour in the U.S., promoting “Alternative Futures: India Unshackled”, a book he recently co-edited with K.J. Joy. Here, he discusses the main themes of the book with Pallav Das and an audience at “Busboys and Poets”, an activist book-store in Washington D.C.
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Joel Kovel, a founder of the Ecosocialist movement passed away, recently. Quincy Saul remembers Kovel’s incredible contribution to politics and activism as well as his seminal ideas.
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Ruth Mwangi explains the novel idea of community currencies to Ashish Kothari, and how it is creating viable economic options for low-income residents of informal settlements in the urban areas of Kenya.
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Ashish Kothari interviews Joel Morist I Botines of Cooperativa Integral Catalana to understand the new thrust of the cooperative movement in Catalonia and how it can be an accessible template for the rest of the world.
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How do we think about alternative politics in light of the current stresses on the environment and the phenomenal increase in inequality, worldwide? Probably, the best place to start is to learn from similar experiments which took place in recent history. Saral Sarkar helps us understand the intellectual debate on the economy, ecology and social relations that took place within “green” politics in Germany, and its ramifications for the contemporary search for alternatives.
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Newts can beat concrete! – if only we manage to build strong alliances with them. This is one of the main lessons from the 50-years long fight against the Notre Dame des Landes airport project in France. Maxime Combes and Nicolas Haeringer recount the incredible journey of a successful campaign that brought environmental activism and transformative prefigurative politics together.
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Multinational corporations want to transform water as a commodity and promote financialization of water bodies and ecosystems, privatizing resources and commodifying a human right. Social movements, unions, local communities, feminist groups and indigenous peoples gathered in Brazil to organize and fight against that vile attempt.
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The Radical Ecological Democracy website wants to promote dialogue across existing divisions – national borders, ideological standpoints, political formations, ethnicities, religions, communities. In that pursuit, Pierre Calame explores possible ways in which a new spirit of public engagement could be created in Europe.
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In the popular imagination, Brazil is celebrated for its rich forests and magnificent rivers. But, the current environmental crisis and climate change have had a significant impact on its natural resources, particularly the availability of water. Mauricio Andres Ribeiro analyses the current water crisis in Brazil and explains the new solutions being crafted by communities and the administration, together.
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After a fiery start in the early 2000s, progressive intent and revolutionary rhetoric are finding it difficult to usher in a meaningful transformation in South America. Neema Pathak-Broome and Ashish Kothari explain how the left in Ecuador is facing up to its dilemmas.
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Yawal Wildlife Sanctuary in central India offers an excellent example of how village councils, with the help of local organizations and government agencies, can use the Forest Rights Act to transform a protected area on the brink of ecological and social disaster into a thriving habitat for wildlife. Neema Pathak-Broome and Yagyashree Kumar take us on that tough and meandering path to recovery.
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If the failure of the idea of “development” is manifest in the economic and ecological crisis rampant all over the world, then how exactly do we assess “modernity”? What are the emerging alternatives to the western narrative of “development”? Arturo Escobar explores the recent thinking on these critical issues.
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Gustavo Esteva narrates his encounter with “development” and how that has shaped his understanding of the need for crafting new alternatives to free market fundamentalism.
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A group of leading thinkers, activists and researchers discusses the roots of contemporary environmental issues and related socio-political challenges facing the world and the possible way out of it.
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If endless growth on a finite planet is a contradiction in terms, then what is the better alternative? Michael Lowy discusses the possibilities.
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Rabindranath Tagore designed a revolutionary form of pedagogy for the educational institutions he founded as a challenge to British educational orthodoxy. It was based on revolutionary environmental principles and influenced by the country’s ancient philosophical insights. Aseem Shrivastava discusses its deep relevance for the contemporary world.
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Would new experiments in Direct Democracy hasten the much needed evolution of representative forms of democracy in the near future? Chistos Zografos gives us an insight into the new developments.
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