How Do We Live Together Now?
July 15, 2014 Kosmos Community News


EVENT: Peter Barnes – Economics for the Anthropocene

The Schumacher Center for New Economics and the American Institute for Economic Research are hosting and Kosmos Associates will be co-sponsoring and attending this talk by Peter Barnes, prominent spokesperson for the Commons. Look for an excerpt in the Fall/Winter edition of Kosmos Journal.

Peter Barnes – Economics for the Anthropocene
Sunday July 27, 2014, 7:30PM
Auditorium, American Institute for Economic Research, Division Street, Great Barrington, MA

Peter Barnes is an entrepreneur and writer who has co-founded and led several successful businesses and written numerous articles and books about capitalism, the commons and other topics. His latest book, With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don’t Pay Enough, proposes universal dividends from shared wealth as a practical solution to economic inequality.


Family Farm: The Mother of our Breath

The United Nations declared 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming. In this article, family farmers in Palau facing challenges, selectively adopt and adapt new approaches while trying to maintain their values.

By Robert V. Bishop

In the westernmost region of the Caroline Islands of Micronesia lies the Republic of Palau. Palauan traditional farming shows how agriculture, family values and culture are interconnected. Despite these connections, family farms are facing challenges. By joining forces, the small-scale family farms of these islands are standing up for their rights and calling for support for maintaining important (agri)cultural customs.


REVIEW: Ecology and Religion, by John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker

By Rick Clugston
IN THE CURRENT EDITION OF KOSMOS JOURNAL

Grim and Tucker argue that religions are entering their ecological phase and that religions should play a critical role in advancing a strong framework for sustainable development based on the convergence of these religious ecologies. Indeed, many religious communities already are contributing examples of compassionate and sustainable living.

Grim and Tucker define religious ecologies as “ways of orienting humans to the universe, grounding them in the community of nature and humans, nurturing them in Earth’s fecund processes, and transforming them into their deeper cosmological selves,” opening us toward “the creative force in the cosmos.” Religious ecologies provide ritual structures and ways of living that connect us to the community of life. Participants in the Harvard conferences identified seven key values for human-Earth flourishing that are shared by the world religions: reverence, respect, restraint, reciprocity, redistribution, responsibility and renewal. These values are foundational to religious ecologies.


GUIDE: Planning sustainable cities for community food growing

A guide to using planning policy to meet strategic objectives through community food growing from Sustain.

This guide brings together in one place examples of planning policies around the UK that support community food growing.

It is aimed primarily at planning authorities to help them to use food growing as a way of creating healthy communities, but contains practical advice for all communities around the different issues that food growing helps to address, from sustainability to residential amenity via health and wellbeing, green infrastructure, regeneration and many other agendas. Within each section they document how food growing has been woven into planning policies to meet these priorities in local areas, and illustrate these with examples of growing projects that have also been set up to help meet that particular agenda. In some cases, such as in Brighton & Hove, the food growing spaces were set up as a direct result of planning policies, which have now led to over a third of new residential developments having integrated space for community food growing.