Professor John P.
Clark's The Impossible Community:
Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert
radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as prosecuted by
capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the intervention of a
mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or communitarian anarchist -
socio-political movements. This project is only "impossible" because
its realization is heterotopic - inherently contradictory - to the prevailing
system of domination, such that it demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of
a different, liberated world: that of the "third great epoch of
history," in Clark's vision, when "humanity finally frees itself and
the earth from the
In
the 1950s the aging Rose Bookchin still lived in the old apartment in East
Tremont, the Bronx neighborhood where she and her family had lived since 1920
and where her son Murray had grown up. Rose had been a diabetic for two decades
and was nearly blind. She was incapable of giving herself daily insulin
injections, so every day Murray took the Third Avenue El to East Tremont to
administer them.
He
would step onto the platform, and if he looked to the south, he could see over
the tops of the buildings the trees of Crotona Park. Then down the stairs and
onto the sidewalk, and he stroke briskly past his old street-side haunts: the
kosher butcher, the deli with pickles and whitefish and knishes, the old candy
store, the dairy with its slabs of butter — the old familiar shops were still
there. Most of the kids he’d known in YCL had moved away too, but their parents
still lived here — the buildings were rent controlled, after all, and it suited
them fine. The vacancy rate in East Tremont was less than one percent. Snatches
of Yiddish in the streets came to his ears, as in the old days, a comforting
sound as always. One difference: the farmers from New Jersey who’d brought
their produce over the bridge into the Bronx — they didn’t come here anymore.
Their farmlands were paved over. No one was farming there or in Yonkers now.
“Zadruga Urbana” is a group of people who came
together with the shared dissatisfaction for the current system of food
production, who believe in the necessity for a collective movement to
take the process into their own hands. We believe that collective
gardens raise people’s awareness of producing their own food, consuming
locally and being autonomous/productive, enabling individuals without
land of their own to produce food with a sensitivity for their local
natural environment.
Our group wants to bring people together to learn and promote the
ideas to find solutions for change towards a more sustainable life
regardless of previous experience. Everyone is welcome to participate in
our gardens and network, to learn and share the skills of producing our
own food. We aim to use local seeds and to fertilize our crop
naturally.
If one can follow in detail some very careful steps in starting up mushroom growing especially on a farm and even more so on a farm with permaculture as part of its design, you can feed a whole bunch of people using what you may otherwise throw away. While growing mushrooms the left overs from the production become some of the best compost and soil producer on earth. It may be a science to know too much but you may regulate how much and what you need to know.
We encountered a great set of videos that are the best introduction to general mushroom knowledge based on a community/collective farm in New Hampshire called D-Acres dacres.org which is among the best community projects we have encountered in this English speaking universe. We hope you find the videos informative and get you started on something
All the versions of this article:
[English][français]
Saturday night, at the construction site of the
dam project in Sivens, at around 2am, Remi died. For those that were
there over the last 6 months at Testet, for those who were in the
battles of at the ZAD at Notre Dame Des Landes, for those who at one
time or another have found themselves face to face with a line of cops,
one thing is obvious, this was neither an error nor a suspicious death,
here we are talking about an assassination.
Saturday night Remi died after a long day of confrontations. The day
before the opponents of the project made the guards leave the site and
managed regain ground by destroying what still remained on the site by
setting it on fire. The next day the anti riot unit of the gendarmerie
returned to the site to protect what is now an empty parking lot. At 2am
that night the death of Remi was announced by medics. Despite this the
police continued to shoot at the protestors until the early morning.
Note: truth-out does great work in sharing knowledge about the reasons we should not yet give up any struggle. In this great piece one should not overlook this paragraph: mandar obedenciedo (command by obeying):
to serve and not be served; represent and not supplant; build and not
destroy; propose and not impose; and convince, not defeat, from below
not above.
Speaking in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, on a cold drizzly New
Year's Eve, the Zapatista Comandante Hortensia addressed the crowd:
"Twenty-five or 30 years ago we were completely deceived, manipulated,
subjugated, forgotten, drowned in ignorance and misery." She was
communicating the official words of the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN) on the 20th anniversary of their rebellion, when
thousands of indigenous people rose up in arms, took over dozens of
major towns and villages in this southern state, and declared "enough is enough, never again will there be a homeland that doesn't include us." Comandante Hortensia went on to explain how over the past two
decades, they have constructed their own autonomous government, complete
with their own health and education system, based in the indigenous
traditions of their ancestors. Despite the continual efforts of the
"neoliberal bad government" to displace them from their land, the
Zapatistas have successfully recuperated thousands of acres of land on
which they have constructed communities that are governed "from the
bottom up." Community members participate in rotating government
positions that operate under the democratic principle of "mandar obedeciendo" (commanding by obeying).
(Image: Bloomsbury)Professor John P. Clark's The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert
radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as
prosecuted by capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the
intervention of a mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or
communitarian anarchist - socio-political movements. This project is
only "impossible" because its realization is heterotopic - inherently
contradictory - to the prevailing system of domination, such that it
demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of a different, liberated
world: that of the "third great epoch of history," in Clark's vision,
when "humanity finally frees itself and the earth from the yoke of
dominion." Taking equally from Buddhism as from dialectical philosophy,
Clark stresses the importance of enlightenment, mindfulness and
awakening as preconditions of revolutionary political praxis. And
although he implicitly seems to agree with the overall thesis of the (anti)catastrophist line developed by Sasha Lilley and company,
he also affirms the productivity of a commitment to truth that squarely
confronts the profoundly shocking, traumatic and even convulsive nature
of such truth: the very first page of his preface acknowledges the
sixth mass extinction in which terrestrial life is at present entrapped
and notes the "horror" of a capitalist world in which billions go
without the basic necessities of a good life. Advancing the philosophy
and practice of communitarian anarchism as an exit from the depraved
present, Clark dedicates much of his text to examining the
anti-authoritarian and cooperative spirit of humanity, as embodied in
many of the customs of pre-modern or "traditional" societies, as in the
history of Western revolutionary movements. In this sense, Clark does
well to distance himself from the Eurocentrism advanced by many Western
radical thinkers, including social ecologist Murray Bookchin, whose
imprint on The Impossible Community is otherwise nearly palpable.
Good public information doesn't come easy these days and many utilize it for profit and often find a way to eliminate it from public eye. Quite often this happens with information published with public money funding academic studies for which industry later purchases the rights and patents. For this reason when we find good information we copy it and preserve it before it vanishes.
Sewage systems and clean water access has for centuries been the largest by far source of health improvement to urban populations. Medicine is quite overstated as a significant component of health, not coming even close to clean water and safe sewage systems, food, shelter, and working conditions.
This web site is aimed at giving support for the publication PC-Based Simplified Sewerage Design and it accompanying Windows based design program. Links are also given to publications on this and other low cost sewerage systems NOW AVAILABLE IN SPANISH AND IN PORTUGUESE AND IN FRENCH (as of 19 Jan 2011) see the download page
IntroductionPC-Based Simplified Sewerage Design was published by the School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds, UK, in January 2001. It is a manual and windows based design program for use in the design of the simplified sewerage system. It was published with the aim of promoting the use of simplified sewerage throughout the developing world. To quote the preface of the manual:
"Simplified sewerage is an important sanitation option in peri-urban areas of developing countries, especially as it is often the only technically feasible solution in these high-density areas. It is a sanitation technology widely known in Latin America, but it is much less well known in Africa and Asia. It is the purpose of this Manual to disseminate this technology more widely in the developing world, so that it can be used in peri-urban sanitation programmes and project to improve the health of poor communities. However, simplified sewerage is not just for peri-urban areas - it can be successfully and appropriately used in middle-and upper-income areas as well.We hope that this Manual serves its purpose of making simplified sewerage better known throughout the developing world, and that the PC-based design program contained herein facilitates the hydraulic design calculations."
How To Get The Manual and ProgramThe manual and program are both available to be downloaded from this site.
The manual in .pdf format can be viewed or downloaded here and
Details of how to download the design program can be found here.
Prof. D Mara School of Civil Engineering University of Leeds Woodhouse Lane Leeds LS2 9JT UK
Note that there is a limited supply of printed manuals and CDs.Simplified Sewerage DescriptionSimplified sewerage is an off-site sanitation technology that removes all wastewater from the household environment. Conceptually it is the same as conventional sewerage, but with conscious efforts made to eliminate unnecessarily conservative design features and to match design standards to the local situation.
Published in Technology and Culture, July 2005, Vol 46 Pages 485-512
In 1993, freelance journalist Howard Rheingold published The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier and with it defined a new form of technologically enabled social life: virtual community.1 For the last eight years, he explained, he had been dialing in to a San Francisco Bay area bulletin-board system (BBS) known as the Whole Earth Lectronic Link, or the WELL. In the WELL s text-only environment, he conversed with friends and colleagues, met new people, and over time built up relationships of startling intimacy. For Rheingold, these relationships formed an emotional bulwark against the loneliness of a highly technologized material world. As he explained, computer networks like the WELL allowed us to recapture the sense of cooperative spirit that so many people seemed to lose when we gained all this technology. 2 In the disembodied precincts of cyberspace, we could connect with one another practically and emotionally and rediscover the power of cooperation, turning cooperation into a game, a way of life a merger of knowledge capital, social capital, and communion. 3
Professor John P.
Clark's The Impossible Community:
Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert
radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as prosecuted by
capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the intervention of a
mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or communitarian anarchist -
socio-political movements. This project is only "impossible" because
its realization is heterotopic - inherently contradictory - to the prevailing
system of domination, such that it demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of
a different, liberated world: that of the "third great epoch of
history," in Clark's vision, when "humanity finally frees itself and
the earth from the 
