Your examples for a positive life are a relief for me to read, thank you for this <3

Anti-nuclear activist and system theorist Joanna Macey has written with Chris Johnstone about what they call “Active Hope.” I recommend the book and the Work That Reconnects, if you are interested. Best summarized by the question “What do I hope for and how can I be active in moving that way?”

thank u so much for your thoughts here :)

Lazare isn’t fully aligned with [Andreas Malm, author of How To Blow Up a Pipeline], who has advocated an “ecological Leninism” of top-down state intervention in the economy.

Anybody have a good sense of what “ecological Leninism” is? This several-word description of “top-down state intervention in the economy” isn’t particularly descriptive, and doesn’t really speak to what is Leninist about Malm’s views in contrast to Lazare’s

Now, via Councilwoman Linda Lee’s cynical and vague Intro 772, the real estate lobby’s coming for a third: an exemption from the law’s provisions for condo and co-op building owners. LL97 targets large buildings. Make no mistake: Residential buildings don’t just stop polluting because people are living there instead of companies.

I’m stumped by this one. Does the real estate lobby have much investment in co-ops and condos? Especially co-ops! I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding here, or if I’m noting something true here that this third example provided is less a matter of bowing to the pressure of the real estate lobby and more about easing the collateral effects that the legislation had on smaller (both far less resourced and far less impactful) entities

I really appreciate reading this, terry_jerry. I work rn at a small architect firm in midwest US, I’m an engineer by training and just happen to be at an architect firm to help them with office management and admin work. They do mostly small-scale residential stuff, and I see this attitude of “at the end of the day it all comes down to who’s paying” so prevalently here too.

How do you go about educating and pushing the system from the bottom in your professional role? I get stumped when my coworkers here just throw up their hands and undersell the influence that they can have on shaping the client’s final say. Sure, some clients come to the firm just because they need a licensed architect to check the boxes and get their project built, but many others are coming to the firm because they respect the architects’ perspective and big-picture vision. The architects that I work with though haven’t had any role-models to show how to push for more sustainable details, or even a shifted paradigm, when in conversation with a client’s unconscious preferences for design approaches that are environmentally-ambivalent. Any suggestions from personal experience here, or even just what you can imagine in a hypothetical interaction with a client?

My (solarpunky) hope is just that all of us step into the power that we really DO have. Architects, however local or global their recognition, are in the perfect position to be shifting the paradigm of what clients and the broader population can even imagine - that’s the power of solarpunk and any speculative genre!

Not all decommodified / cooperatively owned housing needs to be the sort of social housing that tend to come to mind when thinking of a “housing co-op.”

Check out the work that the Beverly Vermont Community Land Trust is doing in Los Angeles: https://laecovillage.org/community-land-trust/. The “eco village” operates in this more crunchy, housing co-op sort of way, but then there are also lots of tenants and home-owners alike who live on the land owned by the land trust, without owning their homes in the standard sense.