NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 26th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 17 February 2023. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net’s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie …
Today, May Day (traditionally a worker’s celebration), could be a hinge moment in U.S. history, when a critical mass of voters and others said “Enough!” to the fat cats attempting to use the pandemic to profit further at public expense. An excellent account of the principles that should guide a compassionate and effective body of …
What can console us in the face of the Great Unknown? I thought I understood that safety was always an illusion: any of us could be struck down at any moment. But having the illusion of safety erased, that’s uncertainty of another magnitude, so vastly out of proportion to the “normal,” default reality that words …
I love to poke around arguments—my own and others’—finding all the blindspots, or at least wearing myself out trying. I like thinkers who question orthodoxies. When I wrote about Braungart and McDonough back in October, for instance, I was impressed with their questioning of sustainability as a goal (why set the bar so low?). I …
I’m on my way home from Philadelphia and the annual meeting of The Shalom Center, where I have the privilege of serving as president. The organization has a long history of peace and justice activism, increasingly arcing toward peace and justice for the Earth, which is to say the healing of global scorching (as our …
In her concluding keynote for Staging Sustainability 2014, Adrienne Goehler exhorted conference attendees to support a “basic income grant” as a universal right. She put it succinctly: the current system forces overproduction in all realms, even art. The current system of grants for artists, inadequate in so many other ways, operates almost exclusively on a …
In my keynote for Staging Sustainability 2014, I was asked to define “sustainability.” “The implicit meaning of the term refers to its opposite,” I told the group. “We fear having damaged ecosystems so much that life on Earth will soon be unsustainable, so sustainability names our search for whatever can heal that damage and allow …
I spent a chunk of last week in a very cold and snowy Toronto at Staging Sustainability 2014, a conference with the subtitle “People. Planet. Profit. Performance.” It was masterminded by Ian Garrett of the Center for Sustainable Practice in The Arts, who teaches at York University. The University was one of an impressive array …
I’ve been traveling lately, talking with people about creating a culture of possiiblity in their own arenas—organizations, communities, companies, movements, and beyond. The idea that animates this work is very simple: we are suffering greatly from the conventional understanding that has suppressed essential ingredients of our species’ astounding capability; we need to bring our whole …
My sweetheart loves to fly fish. He never keeps the fish, just tenderly tips them back into the sea. So he’s plugged into various fishing networks, some devoted to survival of species that are imperiled by human impact. He’s the one who turned me onto Twyla Roscovich’s quite remarkable film, Salmon Confidential. The film painstakingly …