Dzonot & Toh
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Beneath Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula there is a waterworld. The cenotes — a Spanish word derived from the Mayan dzonot, meaning abyss — form a network of underground caves and rivers that run for thousands of miles through limestone, connecting the forest to the sea. They are the region’s only source of fresh water. They shelter species found nowhere else on earth. For Maya people, the caves are portals between the living world and the underworld, where the boundary between the sacred and the material is soluble in cavewater.
Continue reading “Dzonot & Toh”A Fertilizer Import Vulnerability Map
This widget shows the chokepoints and seasonal vulnerability of different countries to import shocks. Slide across the months to see how imports change across the seasons.
Continue reading “A Fertilizer Import Vulnerability Map”What Is Innovation in Agriculture?
The Three Things That Change the World
Many years ago, back when blogging was new and I was a graduate student, I ran an effort called Class Worrier.
Continue reading “The Three Things That Change the World”Polycrisis: A Breviary
This short essay, first published by the Transition Security Project, offers a short introduction to the idea of ‘Polycrisis’, which I’m using to think through some ideas around systems change. If you’d like a more in-depth look, part 1 of a very long essay is here.
Continue reading “Polycrisis: A Breviary”Systems Change Now or Never – A note from the Third Nyéléni Global Forum
Everybody Thinks, Everybody Counts, Everybody Cares, Everybody Acts: Twenty Years of Abahlalism
Speaking at Curries Fountain this weekend, twenty years after Abahlali baseMjondolo emerged from the shack settlements of Durban, I was reminded of what genuine popular democracy looks like when it refuses co-option.
Continue reading “Everybody Thinks, Everybody Counts, Everybody Cares, Everybody Acts: Twenty Years of Abahlalism”The Opposite of MAHA
Original at the Boston Review
More than a century before Zohran Mamdani declared he wanted a New York City network of grocery stores “focused on keeping prices low,” socialists in Spain were furious about a network of grocery stores that kept prices low. An archipelago of tienda-asilos (shelter or asylum shops) had opened across the country in 1886, offering low-cost food for the burgeoning population of urban poor people. For the store’s proponents, tienda-asilos offered a way for working people to buy a square meal without the indignities of charity.
Continue reading “The Opposite of MAHA”Badiou’s Spinoza in the Field
Decades ago, Richard Pithouse and I were reading Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, and discussing his ideas with our comrades in Abahlali baseMjondolo. If you’re picking up a trace of Badiou’s set-theory-as-ethics in this quote by the organisation’s General Secretary – “Every human being, everywhere, must be counted as a human being” – then this might explain it. Thapelo Mohapi, who offered this counter to the xenophobia of South Africa’s Operation Dudula, wasn’t part of our original discussion group, joining Abahlali years after those first conversations. But the trace seems to persist.
Continue reading “Badiou’s Spinoza in the Field”