Friday, October 29, 2010


Here's a link to a text by Russell Means, it's from a speech he gave in 1980- Means speaks to the problem of indigenous cultures becoming "Europeanized."


Here's an excerpt-

"But each new piece of that “progress” ups the ante out in the real world. Take fuel for the industrial machine as an example. Little more than two centuries ago, nearly everyone used wood–a replenishable, natural item–as fuel for the very human needs of cooking and staying warm. Along came the Industrial Revolution and coal became the dominant fuel, as production became the social imperative for Europe. Pollution began to become a problem in the cities, and the earth was ripped open to provide coal whereas wood had always simply been gathered or harvested at no great expense to the environment. Later, oil became the major fuel, as the technology of production was perfected through a series of scientific “revolutions.” Pollution increased dramatically, and nobody yet knows what the environmental costs of pumping all that oil out of the ground will really be in the long run. "

Hi Everyone- Out of our Detroit discussions we see alternative and parallel strategies of land use and geographic narratives-


Here's a new project by artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle that proposes a parallel economy to our current neo-liberal model- it's called Time/Store... another utopian economic alternative to our 'morning after' hyper-capitalist collapse?

Time/Store on Essex Street follows the historic Cincinnati Time Store, opened by the American anarchist Josiah Warren in 1827 as a three-year experiment in alternative economics. Warren's idea was to develop an exchange system where the value assigned to commodities would come as close as possible to the amount of human labor necessary to produce them. For example: 8 hours of a carpenter’s labor could be exchanged for eight to twelve pounds of corn. This system eventually led to the creation of time currency, and to contemporary time banking—an international movement of alternative economics.