Craft should be useful
Making home is what we do, how we live, who we are. But for a while now I have been growing increasingly uneasy with craft for craft’s sake, or perhaps craft to relieve the acedia that is bound up with modernity.
Editor’s picks
Restoring the Wild: How Reintroducing Bison Could Revive Britain’s Landscapes and Ecosystems
Reintroducing European bison to Britain, despite their absence from its history, could help restore ecological balance by fostering biodiversity and reversing some of the damage caused by industrial farming practices.
Crazy Town 101: Even AI Chatbots Hate Us: The Rise of the New Luddites, with Brian Merchant
After failing to raise a single dollar for PCI’s newest initiative — the $350 billion Transdisciplinary Institute for Phalse Prophet Studies and Education (TIPPSE) — Jason, Rob, and Asher devise the only profitable pitch for raising capital: using AI technology to cure the loneliness that technology itself causes. Author Brian Merchant joins Asher this week to discuss the rise of the neo-Luddite movement.
Crazy Town 100. A Temporary Techno Stunt: Tom Murphy on Falling out of Love with Modernity
Recovering technology booster Tom Murphy visits Crazy Town to discuss his journey from shooting lasers at the moon, to trying to “solve” the energy predicament, to falling out of love with modernity itself.
What if we could uncancel the future?
We need something with a focus on action and possibility. We need a movement that shares stories of what’s possible, creating futures so exciting that people can’t help but want to make them happen.
Where the Savior Fish Still Swims
Though nature’s cycles are increasingly uncertain, the Nisg̱a’a relationship with the beloved oily oolie is steadfast. Once the grease is ready, the workers will siphon it off and strain it into jars—preserving a taste that links hundreds of generations of human and fish for another season.
Reviving Native Food Sovereignty
These projects and many others like them are quite literally weaving traditional knowledge, culture, and Native values more deeply into these villages and communities across Southeast Alaska.
7 ideas for going local
This world is not a billiard ball table where we advance by banging into one another. It is a world of relationships, constantly changing, everything in some way feeding everything else. It is a world of mutuality and reciprocity.
In Stunningly Bright Colors
Words can’t fully express our current predicament. We need other tools and other ways of making sense of the situation we now find ourselves in.
The Third Thing
The third thing doesn’t require dreaming, but waking up. It’s more like a property of physics, the round Earth that triangulates everything. It’s also alive, meaning it responds to our efforts and brings its own powers, processes, pathways and beneficial relationships to the project.
Political and climate storms rolling in – Look homeward to make real change
We need to act where we can most effectively act now, in our communities and bioregions, cities and states. We’re only going to make it working together, building the future in place.
Force for Good
When it comes to building community resilience—or building community at all—we have our work cut out for us.