“The People’s Climate” Blog Series, Part 2 “Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good is an admirable, even noble, vision, and expresses very eloquently what will have to be done if humanity is to escape the current race towards disaster."- Noam Chomsky Fable...
Occupy Habitat? Reviving the Occupy Movement, Climate Change & the Commons By Heather Menzies (author of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good) Oxfam’s recent report, Working for the Few, on one per cent of the world’s population controlling most of the...
“The People’s Climate” Blog Series, Part 1 This article starts “The People’s Climate” blog series by Heather Menzies, author of Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good: A memoir & a manifesto. In Reclaiming the Commons, I praise Bill McKibben and 350.org as...
Remembrance Day is always an important day for me as a peace activist and also as a writer who tries to speak truth to power. I participated once again in a White Poppy ceremony at the Cenotaph in Ottawa, after the main Red Poppy event. In my speech I made it clear...
First published in the Ottawa Citizen, July 8, 2014. The Supreme Court’s 8-0 decision recognizing Aboriginal title to land First Nations communities have inhabited since before European contact is huge. It legitimizes understandings of land tenure as habitation and...
Every time a community passes a resolution or otherwise chooses collectively to become a “blue community,” I cheer. A blue community is one that recognizes access to water as a human right and promotes publicly owned water and waste services. (See Brent Patterson's...
Walking the land of my ancestors helped me remember that we live in nature, even as we turn on the tap for a drink of water in a high-rise apartment, or hang a planter full of marigolds and salvia in the backyard of our suburban home. Walking the land that they...
In Halifax, the last leg of my book-launch tour, I met a beautiful person: a Mi’kmaw elder, Billy Lewis, who welcomed me to his ancestral land. I offered him a pouch of tobacco as my gesture of thanks. I also told him that I now understood why it was so important to...
When you’re stuck, you’re stuck because you know you’re at a dead end. You know you’re just flapping your lips, moving words around on the page or in your mouth but without cutting through to something that truly is an alternative to the status quo. I knew that the...
Commons blogger David Bollier posted recently about the works of the great Karl Polanyi now being available online. Yes, too, I am cheering over this. I quoted a lot from Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation when writing Reclaiming the Commons for the Common...