At the recent US Social Forum in Detroit, we got our first look at the Beehive Collective‘s amazing new campaign graphic: The True Cost of Coal, a project Provisions commissioned as part of its Brushfire initiative. It was a sensation, as throngs of social change activists not only got an amazing education on coal, they witnessed how a great arts and social change project functions.
The U.S. Social Forum begins this week. From June 22-26 non-profit organizations, artists, activists, socialists, anarchists, and capitalist social change entrepreneurs alike will be gathering from around the country in Michigan’s own Motor City. What will commence is a week of workshops, people’s assemblies, seminars, lectures, camaraderie, alliance building, and general social change brainstorming. Needless to say, Detroit will be serving as a venue for one of the largest change-makers assemblies to date.
The USSF website states, “The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the economic and ecological crisis. The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.”
With well over 20,000 people registered, the forum is looking to be a powerful, moving, and productive event.
Our very own Donald Russell will be attending this year as a Provisions Library delegate. As well, our friends at the Floating Lab Collective will be partaking in a plethora of events, interventions, performances, and workshops across the forum and the city proper, including the exchange of a Floating Lab currency with others at the forum, collaborations with poets for a projection project and a tentative ride on a grease powered bus through Detroit. Click here for Floating Lab’s Twitter feed, which will be updated frequently throughout the week on their highlights, thoughts, and adventures.
Provisions Library and Floating Lab will likely be attending many of the following workshops throughout the week:
Art Is Change: Art & Creative Practice for Cultural and Political Transformation
Reclaiming Place, Restoring & Sustaining Living Communities
Off Grid and Unplugged: Sustainable Lifestyle Choices & Renewable Resistance
Community Currencies, Microcredit, and Banks: The Banco Palmas Model
Creative Organizing: Using Puppetry and Performance to Move Your Campaign
And many more
Click here for a full list of workshops at the Forum.
If you are not able to make it to Detroit this year, you may be able to catch some of the action at the USSF audio and video feeds.
In response to the vast amount of poverty and struggle within Detroit, a direct result of capitalist failure and crises, Detroit itself has become a quickly transforming hub of grassroots and progressive social movements; however, there is much work to be done. One of the coolest aspects of this year’s USSF are the Work Projects and Work Brigades: “Leading up to the forum, hundreds of folks are coming in Work Brigades to support and work with Detroiters, from gardening to healing, screen-printing, exchanging organizing methods & retrofitting houses. During the forum there will be Work Projects where folks can go into the community and get their hands dirty making real-life, needed improvements here in Detroit which will last long after the Forum.”
As well, individuals will be able to partake in socially conscious tours of Detroit: “Detroit is a living historical center. We will be doing tours of the gardens of Detroit, labor tours, movement tours – there are so many ways to see this amazing place you will be in.”
Detroit, as one of the most economically devastated metropolises in this country, might not seem like an ideal canvass for positive thinking or change making at first glance; however, one needs to take note of, not a supposedly terrifying absence of capital flow, but the birth of social movements within Detroit, which have arisen in the chasm created by the abandonment of industry and the powers of capitalism therein, despite the concurrent struggle therein. Over the past couple of years, Detroit has slowly become a center of alternative community, economy, and green movements and is now serving as the birth place of a powerful and unified national force of social movement: another Detroit is possible, another world is possible.
Today, contemplate potentials and a future more promising than the present world. We can hope for, imagine, and thus direct a future of our own. In this vein, spend some time exploring:
1) Shareable’s Shareable Futures: a call to arms in the discussion and story telling of “a future we can all believe in.”
2) “Theses on the Terrible Community” by The French Collective Tiqqun. “The question we must answer in a final manner is of a more ethical than political nature because the classic political forms and their categories fit us like our childhood clothing. The question is to know if we prefer the possibility of an unknown danger to the certainty of a present pain. That is to say if we want to continue to live and speak in agreement (dissident perhaps, but always in agreement) with what has been done so far – and thus with the terrible communities – or, if we want to question that small portion of our desire that the culture has not already infested in its mess, to try – in the name of an original happiness – a different path.”
3) The Unplugged: “A shareable future from Vinay Gupta: what would happen if millions of people defined “wealth” as access instead of ownership?”
DC area folks,
This month attend “Sowing Seeds Here and Now: A Chesapeake Urban Farming Summit” on June 18th.
Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) 10300 Baltimore Ave College Park, MD 20705
Click here to learn more about all of the exciting and extensive list of workshops, seminars, speakers, etc. which range from learning about the drastic links between food and health to how to plan an urban farm and the connection between food, farming, and environmental justice.
“The goal of our one-day hands-on learning and strategizing event is to catalyze and support urban farming throughout our greater metropolitan DC area.”
The purpose of this piece is to visualize the vast network of altruistic human organizations in every country, city, and community around the world, all working in parallel together. Despite their enormous diversity of size, focus, and geographic location, these organizations are all united around a core set of values in which compassion and stewardship are made highest priorities. The hundreds of millions of individuals who are creating and running these organizations bring a nourishing richness of passion, imagination, and integrity to this process. In that way I think of this piece as being like a compass, pointing toward a true source of hope and inspiration for our times.
Link.
Transformer
1404 P Street, NW
Washington, DC 20005
202-483-1102
Nancy Bannon | Cornfield
Through May 29
“… installation by Nancy Bannon that manifests a life-size, fabricated cornfield within Transformer’s project space, inviting audiences to consider uses and preservation of natural resources. Cornfield is a visual work consisting of a wall-to-wall field of seven-foot tall, sculpted corn stalks made of painted wood, wire and visqueen, along with projections and a surrounding soundscape.”
[Text and graphic from Transformer website. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]
The Hague – In advance of the 18 May Shell Annual General Meeting (AGM), Royal Dutch Shell and its joint-venture Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) are announcing sweeping plans to clean up all areas of the Niger Delta where they operate, compensate local communities for past injuries, and institute a local stakeholders program that will contribute to lifting the region out of poverty.
The Comprehensive Shell Remediation Plan for the Niger Delta (CSR-ND) has been steadily developing behind closed doors since Shell CEO Peter Voser took the helm last year, but was fast-tracked in response to public pressure to include an immediate cessation of deep-water drilling in the Niger Delta.
“Shell is proud to be the first international petrochemical company to embark on a rehabilitation and compensation program of any significant scale,” said Shell spokesperson Bernadette Hopma. “The Gulf of Mexico gush has made CSR-ND especially timely.”
Plan before you plant. Check out this City Farmer post; they have been digging up some vintage videos from the victory garden era. See some of them here. Scroll through City Farmer News to read about urban gardening movements all around the world.
Texts Without Context. NYT story on the implications of screen reading.
Annie Novak’s account of Growing Chefs, the only full-on commercial green rooftop farm in the U.S.
Raj Patel, leader in the food sovereignty movement, is hailed as a messiah, literally.
New study suggests street art provokes meaningful discussion about the world’s urban landscape.
Report from Just Seeds about the Taring Padi cooperative in Yogyakarta, Central Java.
