Material Risk Sharing for a Livable Future
I want to speak of the difference between “no exit” and “trap”. No exit is organic and part of life, born of the reality of being social animals.
Liberation for All: How We Can Talk Differently about Power and Privilege
For the most part, almost everywhere and every time, I have found conversations across power differences repeatedly unsuccessful.
From Exchange to Gifting Part Three: Reintegrating into Flow One Experiment at a Time
In this third part, I want to look more clearly and fully at what we can do, both individually and as groups, communities, and organizations.
From Exchange to Gifting Part Two: Beyond the Exchange/Gift Binary
Many people, even those who live fully within the exchange paradigm and don’t ever think about maternal gifting, prefer going to a farmers’ market, if one exists where they live, or to a local store, rather than to a supermarket. Sometimes they prefer it enough that they are even willing to pay more money. There is a reason for it.
From Exchange to Gifting Part One: Why We Need to Find Our Way out of Scarcity
I [...] looked up economics, and discovered, with anguished relief, that scarcity was baked into the very definition of economics. The one I found at the time was “the study of the allocation of scarce resources.”
Grappling with Our Own Power
In a position of structural power and leadership, I fully accept my responsibility, in general, to hear impacts of my actions on others with less power before saying anything about my own experience of the relationship and any impacts I may have absorbed within it.
Every Tree Wants to Make a Forest: Choice, Togetherness, and the Maternal Gift Economy
Finding our way back to flow means walking back, upstream and uphill. This is the path of nonviolence: walking towards in the face of powerlessness, walking towards in the face of separation, walking towards in the face of scarcity.
Visionary Functioning: Shifting Resource Flow Systems from Incentive to Willingness
(An edited excerpt from the “Resource Flow Systems” learning packet)
Our modern forms of engaging with resources are based on a deep-seated belief about human nature that is so pervasive that it almost never gets said explicitly: that we are only motivated by self-interest, narrowly defined, and that we won’t …
As Things Get Worse
For the last hundred years or so, significant portions of the population within so-called liberal democracies in the global north have known comfort, ease, and personal liberties that have been unprecedented since at least the patriarchal turn. It’s not a new phenomenon for some people within a stratified society to …
Flow, Decision-Making, and Conflict
In an oversimplified way, when flow is interrupted, we need to activate either the decision-making system or the conflict system.
