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On August 1 the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over sixty organizations, rolled out “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” an ambitious document described by the press as the first signs of what young black activists...
Robin D. G. Kelley
12 min
In this film we take a tour of Adam and Sian's beautiful off-grid tiny house truck that was built using mostly reclaimed building materials on the back of a 1969 Bedford truck.
An explanation for why defeating Donald Trump—despite what we know about Hillary Clinton—should be the left's primary national electoral objective this November
Adolph Reed Jr.
Dallas, Ferguson, Nice. Turkey, Trump & Brexit. The simultaneous rise of global terrorism, of authoritarian strongmen and the far-right are the twin faces of our current moment. Even though Trump-type politicians and terrorism pretend to fight each other, on a deeper level...
Otto Scharmer
It is a delicate balance to know how much the world is messed up and still be hopeful about the future. This is something I dance with on a daily basis — while writing about systemic corruption, the angst that arises from&nb
Joe Brewer
Finding and connecting with your soul tribe is more important than ever—not just for connection but also to thrive in our modern society
Al Jeffery
Let’s say you’ve found a new sense of awareness or elevated consciousness — suddenly you feel connected to the beauty of the world, you understand yourself better, and you’re filled with a drive to become better, to nurture yourself and the world around you.
Marc Angelo Coppola
3 min
When one of the kids at Robert W. Coleman Elementary School in West Baltimore acts out, chances are she'll be sent not to the principal's office but to the Mindful Moment room, a soothing space with comfy cushions and beanbags, lit by glowing pink Himalayan salt lamps. It's...
5 min
Why we need to move empathy from personal emotion to collective moral concern -- Empathy comes in two distinct forms: affective empathy is our instinct for mirroring the emotions of others, while cognitive empathy is our conscious ability to understand someone else’s...
How can a traffic offense get you a ticket to prison?
David C. Couper
for a working class orientation at the heart of white anti-racist organizing
Chris Crass
Regardless of the outcome of November’s U.S. elections, what will count most is what happens in the streets. As Frederick Douglass put it plainly a century and a half ago, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did...
Pete Dolack
Hillary Clinton will trounce the self-destructive Donald J. Trump, but the neo-liberals secure total victory if the Sanders movement falls away
RoseAnn DeMoro
The Southern Poverty Law Center gathered hundreds of stories of everyday bigotry from people across the United States. They told their stories through e-mail, personal interviews and at roundtable discussions in four cities. People spoke about encounters in stores and...
SPLC
My favorite definition of privilege is 'thinking something's not a problem because it's not a problem to you.'
8 min
Why Bernie Sanders supporters should advocate for Universal Basic Income.
Can voter identification, registration, and protection efforts help not only defeat Trump, but build a mass movement for democratic socialism?
Jesse A. Myerson
Four ways to make it through trying times with an open heart
Pema Chodron
I am Black. I capitalize Black and leave white lowercased. Sure, it’s the accepted spelling, but really I do it because it feels good. My family lived in Missouri, but my mother crossed state lines to birth me in Kansas. Missouri was a slave state. Kansas was free, and she...
R.L. Stephens
Bringing together the inner and outer aspects of transformation may be the revolution of our times
Kavita Byrd
It's The Biggest Problem in American Politics
Reihan Salam
3 min
This is deep. "Whose story is defining the context of your reality?"
In 1987, the United States Senate passed a resolution which acknowledged the contribution of the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations to the development of the United States Constitution. Furthermore, the resolution acknowledged the historical debt which the United States owes to...
Ojibwa
3 min
This is something everyone can do to take some of the power from the present system and put it into the people's hands. Find a bank near you: blackoutcoalition.org/black-u-s-banks/
Once again we find ourselves confronting the murder of another black man at the hands of police. The video showing Michael Slager fire eight times at a fleeing Walter Scott is irrefutable evidence of the police brutality that people of color fear. As with Trayvon Martin...
Ijeoma Oluo
6 min
It may seem hard, but it's not impossible.
Charles Eisenstein is one of the first people I heard talk about the "new story," synthesizing a diverse movement that has been emerging for the last several decades. When I go back far enough, I first heard about these ideas from reading Ishmael by Daniel Quinn when I was...
96 min
Visions of Utopia documents and profiles 7 diverse intentional communities in the United States.
One of the downsides of presenting such a visionary solution to our global crisis is that it's hard to know where to begin, beyond raising awareness. The gap between where we are now, and where we'd like to go appears so great that it is not at all obvious how the transition...
The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralizing and monopolizing power and control. - Vandana Shiva
Yavor Tarinski
When Donald Trump gets more air time than Bernie Sanders, the media misses the mark on grassroots change.
Sarah van Gelder
Shefali Tsabary's latest book argues that parents need to focus more on themselves and less on their children.
Diana Divecha
The belief that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking. - Murray Bookchin
Marcus Amargi and Stephanie Amargi
Recent research has shown cities what works. For starters, hire more female police officers.
Kate Stringer
On Structural Racism and Daily Inaction
Garrett Bucks
I keep thinking since the horrific police assassinations in Dallas that we’ve been here before. It’s not that so many police officers have been summarily executed. It’s that a palpable tension still exists between police and black people in our country, despite the efforts of...
David C. Couper
In the aftermath of the Leave vote, people will need to find ways to calmly hear each other and bridge divides. Ultimately, we will need to unite against the corporate forces that undermine our wellbeing, not against immigrants who are victims as well.
Kristen Steele
It's time to start imagining a society that isn't dominated by police
José Martín
After tonight's #BlackLivesMatter vigil, I don't have the words to speak to how powerful and moving this event was. It appeared there was about
15 min
How can communities rethink ownership to remedy poverty? In this powerful talk, Eric Kornacki shares the story of his journey carrying lessons learned from Central American sweatshops to empower the transformation of a now-gentrifying neighborhood gripped in poverty in his...
When people ask me, “Who will protect us,” I want to say: Who protects you now?
Mychal Denzel Smith
Martin Luther King Jr. said it best in 1966: "[The] law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important also."
Two years later, he was shot and killed in Memphis. But his dream that the United States legal system might...
Zak Cheney Rice
Economic globalization is destroying livelihoods and replacing them with assembly-line drudgery. But there is a path forward.
Ashish Kothari
My new film How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change debuted on HBO June 27th.
Josh Fox
Social justice and democracy must be at the heart of Brexit negotiations. Progressives must unite to stop the UK turning into a Thatcherite wasteland
Paul Mason
We live in the beginning phase of a global revolution which will turn societal conditions upside down. We cannot stop this transformation, but we can influence where it will go. Will the disintegration of the globalized systems lead to fascist violence and molecular civil...
Martin Winiecki
My supporters and I want real change in this country.
Bernie Sanders
In May 2013, my whole world shifted. At the time, I was living in Amsterdam and I began to feel the call to the Peruvian Amazon to work with the sacred plant medicine ayahuasca.
Arianna Joy
We live in a world that moves faster than we do. Trying to keep up can be an overwhelming task that at times feels hopeless, like we are falling further and further behind—but it doesn’t have to. We are fully capable of adapting to the changing times, and it begins with...
Tommy Lehe
3 min
Despite countries such as Britain and the United States being five times richer than they were a century ago, we are working longer hours than ever before. And, argues author Rutger Bregman, overtime and overwork are deadly. Yet it doesn’t need to be like this – we can cut...
Just existing as a queer person is still a radical —and very dangerous — act.
Noah Michelson
I talk a lot about Basic Income, the concept that everyone should be provided a minimum guaranteed income to provide for basic human necessities (food, clothing, shelter). All over the world it is c
The novelist Terry Pratchett once wrote, “people think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.” However it seems these types of dichotomies are often both/and more than they are either/or. It is true that we are shaped by the stories that we...
Tommy Lehe
MORE THAN AT ANY OTHER time in history, a strong case can be made on pragmatic, utilitarian grounds that war is no longer necessary. Nonviolent statecraft need not be the dream of pacifists and dreamy idealists. It is within our reach.
Simply opposing war and documenting its...
Stephen Zunes
How to live passionately when we’re not sure how the story will end
Even Dawn
How do you get people to do something about climate change? For years, the answer has been to prod people into thinking about their role in causing it, to guilt trip them into action. Because any human who happens to live in North America has taken advantage of central...
Heather Smith
My interview with Tiziano Bonini has ben published in Italian at Che Fara. Here is the English version:
John Thackara and Tiziano Bonini
Brilliant comic sums up tough choices around EU Referendum
Tom Humberstone
Unconditional basic income, a policy option that seems radical by American standards, is gaining new traction across Europe, Canada, and even a few places in the United States. Also known as “universal basic income,” the policy mandates a guaranteed stipend to every resident...
Leslee Goodman
Cultivating a Beginner's Mind
With traditional arts in Asia much emphasis is put on long-term practice and effort, so as to reach continuously higher levels of skill development. There is a deeper character training happening as well, to reduce the ego’s voice, let go of...
Christopher Chase
We seem to have forgotten that the human spirit is not satisfied by material progress alone. It’s time for us to reconnect with nature
Fiona Reynolds
104 min
United Natures explores the rights of Mother Earth, environmental philosophy, wisdom, spirituality, and the potential for a neo-indigenous future for humanity.
For the past twenty years, I have been carrying out experiments to find out how power is distributed in groups. I have infiltrated college dorms and children’s summer camps to document who rises in power. I have brought entire sororities and fraternities into the lab...
Dacher Keltner
2 min
This documentary closely follows the eco-village Cabrum, a recent community in northern Portugal; Cooperativa Integral Catalana, in Barcelona, which practices self-management with its own coins, the Eco; and finally, the self-sustaining community Tamera also in Portugal. The...
For decades, we've been taught that economic growth and buying more stuff will make us happy—while trashing the planet. The good news is, there’s a better kind of happy: It starts with meaningful work, loving relationships, and a thriving natural world.
Sarah van Gelder
19 min
This is a shortened version of the award-winning feature-length documentary film, The Economics of Happiness. Cut down from 68 minutes to less than 20, it provides an introduction to the concept of localization - a systemic alternative to corporate capitalism - and shows how...
In facing up to the many profound crises of our time, we face a conundrum that has no easy resolution: how are we to imagine and build a radically different system while living within the constraints of an incumbent system that aggressively resists transformational change?...
David Bollier
My first impression at OuiShare Fest was a weird utopian blockchain mania: a poorly understood but massively hyped technology that will somehow fix all our social, political, and economic inequities. As I got to know some of the people here though, I started to see through...
Richard D. Bartlett
One of my most popular courses at Swarthmore College focused on the challenge of how to defend against terrorism, nonviolently. Events now unfolding in France make our course more relevant than ever. (The syllabus was published in “Peace, Justice, and Security Studies: A...
George Lakey
In the last few months basic income—an unconditional cash payment to every member of the population—has been getting more and more attention in the media and social networks. Three items are especially interesting.
Daniel Raventós and Julie Wark
“Yes, it looks bleak. But you are still alive now. You are alive with all the others, in this present moment. And because the truth is speaking in the work, it unlocks the heart. And there’s such a feeling and experience of adventure. It’s like a trumpet call to a great...
Joanna Macy
4 min
An animated look at David Schweickart's proposal for a next system, grounded in democratic worker cooperatives and built around public control of financial capital.
It is a sunny April Saturday and I’m running late to an event. This itself is not remarkable – but this time it is because the street I’m looking for in Lambeth is not marked on my map. When I find the launch for Switched On London, I discover I’m not the only one puzzled by...
Fanny Malinen
Parenthood lies deep within us. We are wired to help our little ones survive and prosper.
Modern life, however, has removed us from our natural environment. It can be hard to raise a child in world of fear and distractions. Science and psychology bring back a big dose of...
Vegard Gjerde
Many changes happening around us remain unclear. We need better names and stories for them.
Joe Brewer
More than 1,500 community gardens have been started on vacant land in Detroit alone in recent years.
Sher Watts Spooner
Among climate change activists, solutions usually center on a transition to renewable energy. There may be differences over whether this would be best accomplished by a carbon tax, bigger subsidies for wind and solar power, divestment from fossil fuel companies, massive...
Steven Gorelick
Lodged between two of the most populated countries on earth — India and China — Bhutan may be small at 700,000 souls, but it has a mighty role to play in showing the world how to preserve the environment, while also cultivating happiness in its human population. In fact, the...
Carolanne Wright
There is nothing more difficult to plan, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the creator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old system and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new one.”
—...
John Fullerton
In the struggle for a more just society, we will be aided, not hurt, by our shared nature.
Bhaskar Sunkara & Adaner Usmani
Are we able to stop fracking and other threats to the environment from coming into our communities? Are we able to protect local farming from sewage sludge or factory farming? Are we able to protect workers and local economies from multi-national corporations?
CELDF
13 min
Pia Mancini and her colleagues want to upgrade democracy in Argentina and beyond. Through their open-source mobile platform they want to bring citizens inside the legislative process, and run candidates who will listen to what they say.
3 min
What does "a good day" mean to you?
23 min
This short documentary is about the self sustaining community of Tamera, Portugal. In the film we speak with the residents of the community, who tell us how they made that originally dry land available for living, how they started organic agriculture, how they use biogas and...
2 min
How can we create participatory workplaces that make decision making more democratic and compensation and job assignments more equitable? In this new animation from the Next System Project, building off Robin Hahnel's paper for our New Systems series, we explore the answer...
1 min
Amsterdam collective Fiction Factory has developed a modular building system of cardboard components, which can be assembled in just one day to form houses or offices. Named Wikkelhouse, which translates from Dutch as Wrap House, the completed prototype comprises a series of...
41 min
Disobedience is a film about a new phase of the climate movement: courageous action that is being taken on the front lines of the climate crisis on every continent, led by regular people fed up with the power and pollution of the fossil fuel industry.
“How do we grow the economy?” is an obsolete question. Local initiatives across the world are looking for maturity instead as they rebuild caring, place-based communities and economies.
David Korten
3 min
A New Story For Humanity presents a beautifully and sensitively woven tapestry of the rich diversity that is the human family. Featuring interviews on the essential topics of our time: from cosmology to ecology, from ancient wisdom to current thinking, from leadership to...
The world is a pretty screwed up place. So how do we fix it when we ourselves are broken? This is the question that rarely gets asked — and it is a keystone piece of the solution to all the global crises in the world.
Global Warming? Can’t fix that and create healthy...
Joe Brewer
Have you ever noticed how we, as a society, use agricultural metaphors to talk about parenting and education? We speak of raising children, just as we speak of raising tomatoes or chickens. We speak of training children, just as we speak of training horses. Our manner of...
Peter Gray, Ph.D.
72 min
It’s true; musicians can be a catalyst for social change! Watch the inspiring story about the first Permaculture Action Tour, with music producer The Polish Ambassador, that covered over 9,000 miles though 33 cities and 19 states, from San Francisco to New York City...
Political rhetoric in the U.S. is often characterized by sickly sweet appeals to democracy. Voting is held up as the foundation of democracy, or as the most useful or necessary method of political participation or expression. Judging by that rhetoric, and by the image of the...
Kevin Cashman
If the left is to fight back against authoritarianism, we must bring together diverse movements working for social change.
Henry A. Giroux
24 min
Part of the way the U.S. Empire's elections are rigged is the corporate media's censorship of third-party candidates, despite their nationwide campaign efforts. The Green Party, running Dr. Jill Stein for President, has been totally ignored by the establishment. Abby Martin...
When maximizing profits isn’t the only goal, companies can actually work better.
Michelle Chen
Last year, I was invited to give a talk on peace in Carbondale, Illinois. I was surprised to discover that in recent years, activists from across Carbondale had come together with a broad vision of what their community could one day become—a nonviolent city. They wanted a new...
Rev. John Dear
20 min
The Blueprint project is an integrated response system especially applicable in emergency situations. The model includes permaculture practices, solar and biogas energy usage, natural building methods and water harvesting structures. We only offer what we use ourselves – for...
11 min
If we do not initiate the young they will burn down the village to feel the heat. - African Proverb
The villages are burning. Worldwide. An estimated $500 billion is spent yearly on teen dysfunctions in the U.S. alone: drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy and STDs...
Sometimes I feel this sense of "oneness" in my body and it's hard to describe, but I say 'we're all one' as a verbal way to describe the feeling. At other times oneness is an intellectual idea that I know to be true but I don't feel it in my direct experience.