Hannibal Rhoades discusses why Gaia's new film, The Farmer, The Architect and The Scientist
“People are realizing that we can’t rely on the industrial food system much longer. The awakening that’s happening is our greatest opportunity,” says New Mexican farmer and activist Miguel Santistevan. This awakening has sparked the revival of local, sustainable food systems. At its most basic, sustainability connotes a system capable of continuing indefinitely...
News reports tell us that more than 500 people have now died and more than 2,500 were injured in Savar, Bangladesh, while the toll in West, Texas stands at 15 dead and over 200 injured. Behind these two disasters is a common thread of greed – and a common need for unionized resistance. “It was like a nuclear bomb went off,” said the mayor as a mushroom cloud soared...
A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, produces the best for humanity. This was always a distortion of Darwin’s ideas. His 1871 book The Descent of Man...
Your information diet is an ethical choice of yours, so when you’re on the Huffington Post looking at say the Kardashians and you click on the Kardashians, understand that you are not only reading that article, but you’re also voting for that article. You’re telling an editor to produce more content like that at the expense of the stuff that you didn’t click on...
1. Green Worker Cooperative’s Co-op Academy?, The Bronx, N.Y. Ideas for co-ops may flourish, but few people understand exactly how to make theirs real. The Co-op Academy is providing answers. Founded four years ago by Omar Freilla (who recently made Ebony magazine’s list of the Power 100), the academy runs 16-week courses that offer intensive mentoring, legal and financial...
Q. In a freed market, who will stop markets from running riot and doing crazy things? And who will stop the rich and powerful from running roughshod over everyone else? A. We will. Sheldon Richman put up a nice piece last week for The Goal Is Freedom called Regulation Red Herring: Why There’s No Such Thing as an Unregulated Market . (Incidentally, while you’re...
As a filmmaker, it’s a rare privilege to stumble upon a completely unique story—in the case of my new documentary, Grasp the Nettle , a motley collection of land rights activists , squatting a three-acre piece of land in the heart of suburban London. With my video camera and microphone in hand, I decided to give up my job and flat to move in with a group of outsiders...
Our little group of a dozen families was running out of time. After meeting every weekend for three years to plan our hoped-for cohousing community, and after investing much of our savings to acquire a few acres of land, it looked as though our dream would fail. We couldn’t find a bank that would finance a cooperative. It was our local credit union that saved us...
As regular readers of this blog know, I have in previous posts commented on hunter-gatherers' playfulness ; their playful religious practices ; their playful approach toward productive work ; their non-d
San Franciscans pass by panhandlers every day. Some give change. A few smile. Fewer still strike up a conversation. It's likely that only one has ever formed a relationship with a panhand
‘Mindless, violent thugs, hell-bent on sowing chaos.’ That’s the kind of press anarchists often get. Uri Gordon provides a more sympathetic take on a growing yet still little understood political movement. I must have been eight or nine years old when I first heard the a-word. I don’t remember the context, but I do remember asking my mother what...
Disambiguation: According to the capitalist lexicon, the “Free Market” is the economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses. Any sensible person can recognize immediately that neither human beings nor resources are free in such a system; hence, a “Really Really Free Market” is a market that operates...
October 2012, Notre dames des Landes, France -- Chris leans forward, her long fingers play with the dial of the car radio “I’m trying to find 107.7 FM“ … a burst of Classical music, a fragment of cheesy pop. “ Ah! Here we go! I think I’ve got it?” The plastic pitch of a corporate jingle pierces the speakers: “Radio Vinci Autoroute: This is the...
You know it's true. Otherwise, why does everyone cringe when you say the word? Why has attendance at your discussion group meetings fallen to an all-time low? Why has the oppressed masses not come to its senses and joined you in your fight for world liberation? Perhaps, after years of struggling to educate them about their victimhood, you have come to blame them for their condition. They...
In many spiritual circles, it is popular to talk about gratitude. Gratitude encompasses much more than a quickie “thank you.” It implies a much deeper state of mind, one that practitioners realize will position you to receive even greater abundance. Gratitude – together with all the volumes that have been written about it – is very much an ingredient of the gift...
I know we’re not supposed to say such things, but I have lost faith in national politics. Yes, I’ll [continue to vote in] elections and do my part to get the less sold-out, less anti-communitarian candidate in office. But I no longer look to the top tier of centralized government to solve our problems or help us grope toward conclusions together. For me, big government has become...
Do you mulch your relationships? Kim Millar explains how Permaculture principles work just as much in the home, as they do in the garden Most of us don't 'design' our relationships consciously, we're more likely to stumble and/or bumble along in the hopes that they'll grow in the right direction. They usually catch our attention only when things have gone wrong and we scramble around...
Beauty in Darkness is a documentary of four short stories portraying difficult situations that people in Gumaca are suffering from, a typical scenario of a dark reality occurring in different parts of the world. It is in the most challenging situations that the intangible is hardest to recognize. However, the people in the movie demonstrate that the beautiful qualities are truly inherent in...
If you're a regular reader of The Salt, you've probably noticed our interest in foraging. From San Francisco to Maryland , we've met wild food experts, nature guides and chefs passionate about picking foods growing in their backyards. Now, Washington state has jumped on the foraging bandwagon with plans to develop a 7-acre public plot into a food forest. The kicker? The lot sits smack in...
SolidarityNYC is a New York City-based group which works to create links between social movements and the "solidarity economy." The latter consists of cooperatives, small businesses, non-profits and other economic activities which "reinforce values of justice, ecological sustainability, cooperation, and democracy." The group aims to promote the solidarity economy as an alternative to the...
One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority. While all cultures are different, in many non-modernized societies children enjoy wide latitude to learn by free...
The history of activism is a cat-and-mouse game of surprising tactical innovations that spark an insurrectionary situation and the counterstrategies developed to put down the revolt. In 1848, the invention of the barricade toppled the King of France and sparked a Europe-wide people's uprising. In 1999, the unique mixture of a carnivalesque mood with human lockboxes disrupted the World Trade...
It's been five years since the Films For Action project began in Lawrence, Kansas. It started with one simple idea: we can't depend on the mainstream media to inform us, so let's become the media ourselves by hosting documentaries on issues that the corporate media ignores. Over the years we 've hosted over 30 film screenings, launched a website that has attracted over 380,000...
Hey you creatives, artists, environmentalists, workers, moms, dads, students, malcontents, do-gooders and aspiring martyrs in the snow: The last four months have been hard fought, inspiring and delightfully revolutionary. We brought tents, hunkered down, held our assemblies, and lobbed a meme-bomb that continues to explode the world's imagination. Many of us have never felt so alive. We...
I have yet to see my nearest large occupation, Boston, or the precursor of all U.S. occupations, Wall Street. Instead, I have been on the road for the past six weeks in Thesselonika and Athens Greece; Istanbul and Diyarbikar Turkey; Lexington, Kentucky; London, England; Dublin, Ireland; and in Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia Spain. In all these places, I talked with diverse individuals at...
The occupy movement continues to grow city-by-city, town by town right across Turtle Island (North America) and right across the planet. People are occupying parks and squares, banks, and businesses, now we must truly embrace the slogan ‘occupy everywhere.’ OCCUPY SQUADS ‘Occupy Squads’ are groups of people willing and committed to responding to examples of...
Last night, after one of the most remarkable days of resistance in recent history, some of us within Occupy Oakland took an important next step: we extended the occupation to an unused building near Oscar Grant Plaza. We did this, first off, in order to secure the shelter and space from which to continue organizing during the coming winter months. But we also hoped to use the national...
CREATING COMMUNITY: (Above) Chris O’Donnell, 24, of Bushwick, Brooklyn, takes a break at the Occupy Wall Street encampment. The kitchen has been serving free meals to as many as 1,000 people a day. (Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales) “Who is ready to defend our park?” the speaker shouted. It was 6 a.m. and thousands of us filled the Occupy Wall Street camp under a...
To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice. Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its...
Starting with the occupation of a park next to Wall Street on September 17, a new movement is spreading across the country in which people gather in public spaces in protest against social inequalities. We’ll present a full analysis of this phenomenon here shortly; in the meantime, here’s an open letter to the occupation movement, engaging with some of the issues that have...
Since last Saturday, a situation has escalated around the UK, with eruptions of long-repressed anger in most major cities. Whilst this anger may have certainly, at times, taken on forms that we disapprove of, we all know where this anger comes from. We are all suffering at the moment. Trying to make ends meet can be a living nightmare – benefits, jobs and healthcare going down the drain...
This is one of those times when everyone has something to say, and are desperate to say it, to make their voice heard. On every bus, café, pub, shop, and street, people are talking about the riots, the causes and the consequences. Emotions are running high in Britain today, but there’s one feeling that overwhelms all others – anger. And it takes many different...
“Back in the 60’s I was an activist too, but you’ve just got to learn how to be realistic.” These words seem to form a brick wall that many of us have run up against. The good-hearted person that just can’t help out anymore because they’ve gotten cynical or exhausted, usually after finding that, despite their best intentions, their years of fighting turned...
Residents from 10 Bidayuh villagers this week set fire to five logging camps and thirteen heavy machines in a stark protest against logging activities on their land, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. As reported by Free Malaysia Today , the Bidayuh villagers took matters into their own hands because of the governments refusal to address their complaints about logging activities within...
There’s no doubt that the U.S. culture is famous for its promises of happiness. As age-old as the idea of the “American dream” is the idea that working hard and making money to create the life you want will lead you to happiness and bliss. It’s made painfully obvious in movies, TV shows, billboards and ads everyday: The best way to find happiness today, at this moment...
Frack! tells the story of the unconventional gas-drilling ("fracking") frenzy sweeping the Marcellus region, including the Catskills and Upper Delaware River watershed, threatening pristine areas which provide clean drinking water for over 15 million people. Without a massive public outcry, once idyllic rural landscapes could become toxic industrial wastelands, and New York State a gas...
Reaching out to young people is especially critical at this time. With mounting psycho-social stress attributed to an increasingly uncertain future, young people are going to need support grappling with the social effects of so many convergent crises. The world is rife with uncertainty about our fate on the planet. Declining ecosystems and biodiversity, a quickly destabilizing climate and an...
The main purpose of this book is to try to persuade revolutionaries to shift the sites of the anticapitalist struggle and to select new battlefields. I identify three strategic sites for fighting - neighborhoods, workplaces, and households - that I believe will not only enable us to defeat capitalists but also to build a new society in the process. The advantage of this shift is that it...
A dangerous thing can occur when you start learning about what's really going on in the world. The problems start to seem so complex, and you're just one person, doubts begin to creep in. You sincerely want to help change the world, but from all this knowledge you start to believe that the world is too out of control and too big to change, so you end up not doing anything. What aspiring...
Each day there are opportunities for resistance, liberation, freedom, creativity, engagement, and meaning. It is easy to miss these opportunities and get distracted and bogged down by day-to-day hassles -- stuck in traffic, staring at the internet, emotionally numb, confused, and feeling disconnected from anything important. There are no easy answers about how to live our lives but we all make...
Consider this: thousands of diverse, locally-rooted, grassroots economic projects are in the process of creating the basis for a viable democratic alternative to capitalism. It might seem unlikely that a motley array of initiatives such as worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives, community currencies, urban gardens, fair trade organizations, intentional communities, and neighborhood...
Will Stewart-Starks, an Iraq Veteran and member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) gives an audience of Lawrence art enthusiasts and local activists a summary of his organizations recent campaign to address military deployments of wounded soldiers. Ar t show introduces Lawrence community to Operation Recovery Campaign February 12, 2011, Lawrence, KS --
Would you be willing to spend four hours stacking shelves in a supermarket? Regularly? For nothing? And do a spot on the tills, and quite a lot of floor-mopping? Well, it certainly makes a change from hanging out at Starbucks, I suppose. As I climb into my overalls, grab a sponge and tell my supervisor I would really prefer the Frozen Lime and Vinegar Mr Muscle over plain Mr Muscle, I...
Preamble We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common...