Mutual aid. Local money. Collaborative care. Alternative futures are being created around the world -. but not, for the most part, in plain sight. David Bollier’s new book – Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead – brings dozens of social projects like these to the fore. Inspired by The Whole Earth Catalog of the early 1970s, Bollier’s premise is that “the next big thing will be a lot of small things” – (words he borrows from the Belgian designer Thomas Lommé). Our conversation here ranges from the history of mutual aid and commoning, to our respect for a pluriverse of cultures that respect all of life, not just human life.

00:00 – start
00:30 – From system critiques to real-world action
02:15 – The long pre-history of mutual aid
07:48 – Knowledge based on practice
11:56 – The Commons and commoning
13:15 – Reimagining value
20:55 – The Commoner’s Catalogue
29:42 – Ways of being – a pluriverse
30:43 – Animate Earth
36:14 – Microbes and social equity
38:48 – In this for the long haul
45:32 – How do mindsets change?
48:55 – The next big thing

SOURCES

David Bollier website (and his other books) http://www.bollier.org/
David Bollier podcasts http://www.bollier.org/podcasts
Reimagining Value : Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature Commons Strategies Group, David Graeber, Heinrich Böll Foundation (book/pdf, 2016) https://www.boell.de/sites/default/fi…

The Commoner’s Catalogue for Changemaking, David Bollier (book/flipbook 2022) David Bollier has posted The Commoner’s Catalog online as a free “flipbook,” licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You can read it, and find weblinks for buying it, at commonerscatalog.org.

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Pëtr Kropotkin (book, 1902/1932) The Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin explores the role of mutually-beneficial cooperation and reciprocity (or “mutual aid”) in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/libra…

Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, Stephan Harding (book, 2014) How Gaian science can help us to develop a sense of connectedness with the ‘more-than-human’ world – a careful integration of rational scientific analysis with our intuition, sensing and feeling. https://www.greenbooks.co.uk/animate-…

Gaia Alchemy: The Reuniting of Science, Psyche, and Soul (book, 2022) A bold exploration of the reintegration of rationality and intuition, science and soul, to foster individual and planetary healing. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5…
Debt: The First 5.000 Years, by David Graeber (book, 2014) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6…
Enlivenment : Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene, by Andreas Weber (book, 2019) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/enlive…
Microbes and Social Equity, Interview with Dr Susan Ishaq (video) • Microbes and Soci…
The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi (book, 1944) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gre…)

Is GDP a doomsday machine? (blog post, 2009) “Beyond GDP” discussion at Forum d’Avignon Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, ed. Ashish Kothari et al (book, 2019) https://degrowth.org/2018/04/14/new-b…

Systems of mutual assistance in Africa, Interview with Mugendi M’Rithaa (2011) http://thackara.com/learning-design/a…

Interrupting the dominant narrative, Amador Fernández-Savater (blog post, 2013) https://guerrillatranslation.wordpres…