Perhaps you’ve seen pictures of Xingtai, China’s industrial steel city, or more accurately, struggled to see anything amid the palpably thick layers of noxious air pollution. An alarming statistic correlates human disease and mortality to the air we breathe – it is estimated that 18,000 people die every day worldwide as a result of air pollution. […]

A visit to the Hambacher Forest to meet the activists living in the forest to fight the coal giant, RWE. *this article first appeared on tbd* as part of the ‘Adventures in Activism‘ column. “My fingertips are thoroughly numb, as a lilac dusk descends on Hambacher Forest and the dying light spotlights a solitary treehouse […]

Rich, white and male. European cities are peppered with statues, and you’ll find that the overwhelming majority of these have a few things in common. *this article first appeared on tbd* as part of the ‘Adventures in Activism‘ column. Statues of people have much longer life expectancies than people themselves. Bronze and marble outlast flesh […]

A case study on the nature and value of activism. *this article first appeared on tbd* as part of the ‘Adventures in Activism‘ column. For anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes with me, they will have probably received an earful of gushing about this or that activist collective or why this social movement […]

Lessons from New Orleans & a Commitment to Urban Social Movements One sunny morning a couple of weeks ago in April, while attending the EDGE Funders Alliance‘s annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, I woke up, grabbed a coffee and walked right into a dystopia together with about twenty other conference participants. Our walking tour […]

To truly hope, we must be able to articulate clearly and compellingly what it is that we’re hoping for. One of the most rebellious things that we can do is to articulate our own, radical vision, to organize around that vision, and to build real alternatives that embody it in our daily lives. – Farhad Ibrahimi    […]