Icons on the Barricades: Ukrainian Protest Art
By Konstantin Akinsha and Alisa Lozhkina
Artists have been at the center of the protests in Ukraine, offering murals, performances, and a golden “throne”
In January, the clashes between Ukrainian anti-government protesters and police and special forces erupted into violence. The center of Kyiv became a battlefield, with smoke from burning tires drifting overhead. Police bullets and gas grenades…
Learning to Live by Nature’s Design
By Martin Hill, from Kosmos Journal, Fall/Winter 2008
Disconnection from nature is a recent occurrence. Humans have been deeply rooted in ecology and totally dependent on local climate and food sources for ninety percent of the time we have existed on earth.I think the need for direct connection with the natural world is dialed into our genes. Disconnection is making us dysfunctional.…
Last Word: Dana Lynne Andersen
Dana Lynne Andersen shares the Core Beliefs of Awakening Arts Academy
We believe that Art is Powerful
The power of Art can be used to degrade or to uplift the Human Spirit. While art can reflect the tawdry realities and bitter truths of the world around it, it can also imagine a world beyond the obstacles, and in doing so inspire the solutions. Art can offer the despair of nihilism or the hope…
Bioregional Economies
Reliable Prosperity
When the health of ecosystems and communities is not integrated into economic activities, all three suffer. In turn, economic dependence on destructive activities creates apparent conflicts between work, nature, and community. How can we create an economy that effectively meets human needs while regenerating natural systems? An economy which grows organically — and fills new…
Ecosophy: Nature’s Guide to a Better World
When Sharing Isn’t Caring
By Nathan Schneider
In the beginning, there was sharing. That, at least, is the story according to Dominik Wind, a German environmental activist with a genial smile and a cycling cap whom I met in Paris while attending a conference earlier this month about the sharing economy. Years ago, out of curiosity, Wind visited Samoa for half a year; he found that people shared tools, provisions and even…
New Monasticism: A Feminist Perspective From a Woman, Yogi, Mother, and Spouse (excerpt)
By V.K. Harber
I am many things: a woman, a yogi, a mother, a spouse, a writer. I am also a contemplative. Before you begin imagining me serene and peaceful, clothed in flowing robes and residing on a mountaintop, allow me to tell you straight away: I’m not that kind of contemplative. No, I am elbow-deep in the business of life and all the mess and beauty that it entails: family, children,…
Europe in Transition: Local Communities Leading the Way to a Low Carbon Society,
By Rob Hopkins, Post Carbon Institute
One of the most fascinating recent studies into the impact of Transition was Local Communities Leading the Way to a Low Carbon Society, a report published by AEIDL (Association Européenne pour l’Information sur le Développement Local. It looks at Transition, permaculture and ecovillage networks, what it calls the "Silent Revolution", "a potentially powerful…
Is Sharing for Sale?
Dear Readers,
Our featured author this week is Elisabet Sahtouris, an eloquent teacher of evolution biology and also a futurist. Like many of us, she senses that global transformation is underway in our hearts and minds, our communities, and slowly in our social institutions. In Ecosophy: Nature's Guide to a Better World, in the current issue of Kosmos Journal, she suggests that greed is in…
Post-Occupy: The Next Revolution will be Rural
By Amber Cortes
Micah White
In a boarded-up hotel along a windy country road, a couple dozen activists are gathered for a workshop. They are mostly women, and mostly over 40. The workshop is being held by Micah White, one of the instigators of Occupy Wall Street.
After the dust settled from Occupy, White packed up his bags in the Bay Area and moved here to Nehalem, a small town in one of the…