Derek Wall: Almost every day, we learn of new horrors in the Middle East. Syria and Iraq are suffering from a brutal war. Fundamentalist groups like the so-called Islamic State and authoritarian leaders are murdering innocent citizens. Yet there is one sign of possible hope: in Northern Syria, the Kurdish people and their allies have established a secular, feminist and ecological republic, called Rojava, which means ‘the West’.

It would be easy to romanticise this – in a situation of conflict and war, it can be difficult to put high ideals into practice. Nonetheless, Rojava, with its organic agriculture, cooperatives, direct democracy and women’s leadership, is both fascinating and inspiring.

Most striking is the fact that Rojava is based on the teachings of a New York, working-class and Jewish-born green philosopher, Murray Bookchin. Bookchin, who died in 2006, is having a massive and massively positive effect in the Middle East. Ecology or Catastrophe is the unputdownable biography of Bookchin, which I am sure will be thought provoking to any member of the Green Party.

Bookchin was born in the 1921. His parents had emigrated from Russia and his grandmother had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a peasant- based radical organisation. From childhood, Bookchin was immersed in political activity and made a transition from socialism to anarchism to his own form of politics he called communalism.

He can be seen as an early advocate of radical green politics. His book, Our Synthetic Environment, published in 1962, discussed the dangers of pesticides. In the 1950s, he was already warning of the effects of climate change caused by fossil fuels. He campaigned against giant freeways that devastated cities and felt that cars were wrecking the environment.

Janet Biehl was Bookchin’s partner, and her book is honest, showing Murray’s flaws as well as his greatness. It is a very personal and sometimes sad book, but it is also political and philosophical, introducing the reader to important ideas.

Bookchin thought deeply about green politics, arguing that capitalism threatened our survival and that we need a democratic, ecological alternative. To challenge climate change and introduce a socially-just society isn’t easy, but Murray provides some ideas and inspiration we can learn from.

Reprinted blog by Derek Wall on Greenworld, you can see the original post here

Featured Image: “Kurdish YPG Fighters” by Kurdishstruggle is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

The post Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A co-operative revolution is happening in Northern Syria

The post Project of the Day: Cooperation in Mesopotamia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sean Keller: In Rojava, a region in Syria also known as North Kurdistan, a groundbreaking experiment in communal living, social justice, and ecological vitality is taking place. Devastated by civil war, Syria is a place where a cessation of hostilities often seems like the most that can be hoped for. But Rojava has set its sights much higher. What started as a movement for political autonomy in the city of Kobane has blossomed into an attempt to build a radical pluralist democracy on the principles of communal solidarity — with food security, equality for women, and a localized, anti-capitalist economy at its core.

The Mesopotamian Ecology Movement (MEM) has been at the heart of Rojava’s democratic revolution since its inception. The Movement grew out of single-issue campaigns against dam construction, climate change, and deforestation, and in 2015 went from being a small collection of local ecological groups to a full-fledged network of “ecology councils” that are active in every canton of Rojava, and in neighboring Turkey as well. Its mission, as one of its most prominent founding members, Ercan Ayboğa, says, is to “strengthen the ecological character of the Kurdish freedom movement [and] the Kurdish women’s movement”.

It’s not an easy process. Neoliberal policies, war, and climate change have made for an impressive roster of challenges. Crop diversity has been undermined due to longstanding subsidies for monocultures. Stocks of native seeds are declining. The region has been hit by trade embargoes from Turkey, Iraq, and the central Syrian government, and villages have been subject to forced displacement and depopulation. Groundwater reserves are diminishing, and climate change is reducing rainfall. Many wells and farms were destroyed by the self-described Islamic State (ISIS), and many farmers have been killed by mines. Much of the region is without electricity. And there has been an influx of refugees from the rest of Syria, fleeing civil war.

As MEM sees it, the solutions to these overlapping problems must be holistic and systemic. Ercan gives an impressive rundown of MEM’s priorities: Decreasing Rojava’s dependence on imports, returning to traditional water-conserving cultivation techniques, advocating for ecological policy-making at the municipal level, promoting local crops and livestock and traditional construction methods, organizing educational activities, working against destructive and exploitative “investment” and infrastructure projects such as dams and mines — in short, “the mobilization of an ecological resistance” towards anything guilty of “commercializing the waters, commodifying the land, controlling nature and people, and promoting the consumption of fossil fuels”.

In 2016, MEM published a declaration of its social and ecological aims, and it is a thing of beauty. “We must defend,” it says, “the democratic nation against the nation-state; the communal economy against capitalism, with its quick-profit-seeking logic and monopolism and large industries; organic agriculture, ecological villages and cities, ecological industry, and alternative energy and technology against the agricultural and energy policies imposed by capitalist modernity.”

Getting children involved in all of this is critical. Schools in Rojava teach ecology as a fundamental principle. In 2016, with the support of Slow Food International and the Rojava Ministry of Water and Agriculture, MEM helped build a series of school gardens in villages around the city of Kobane, in order to provide a ‘laboratory’ for children to learn about the region’s biodiversity and how to care for it. These gardens are growing fruit trees, figs, and pomegranates, instead of corn and wheat monocultures. Some have been planted on land that was once virtually destroyed by ISIS. In Rojava, even cultivation comes inherently infused with a spirit of resistance. “We grew up on this land and we haven’t abandoned it,” says Mustafa, a teacher whose school was one of those to receive a new garden in 2016. “As a people of farmers and livestock breeders, we have always tended the crops using our own techniques, which are thousands of years old.” As the MEM declaration says, “Bringing ecological consciousness and sensibility to the organized social sphere and to educational institutions is as vital as organizing our own assemblies.”

The spirit of resistance is as alive in the realm of society and economics as it is on the land. The cooperative economy in Rojava is booming. Michel Knapp, a longtime activist in the Kurdish freedom movement and co-author of the book Revolution in Rojava, observes that most cooperatives in Rojava are “small, with some five to ten members producing textiles, agricultural products and groceries, but there are some bigger cooperatives too, like a cooperative near Amûde that guarantees most of the subsistence for over 2,000 households and is even able to sell on the market.”

The government of Rojava is democratic and decentralized, with residential communes and local councils giving people autonomy and control over decisions that affect their lives. Municipal-level government bodies are systematically integrated into the operations of MEM, in a one-of-a-kind partnership between the public and nonprofit spheres. And the prison system is being radically reformed, with local ‘peace committees’ paying attention to the social and political dimensions of crime in passing judgment. Most cities contain no more than one or two dozen prisoners, according to Ercan.

And to top it all, women have taken a leading role in every facet of the revolution. Women’s cooperatives are a common sight in Rojava, as are women’s councils, women’s committees, and women’s security forces. Women’s ecovillages have been built both in Rojava and across the border in Turkish Kurdistan, aimed at helping victims of domestic violence and trauma. Patriarchy is just one more aspect of the neoliberal program being cast aside in Rojava, on the road towards building what MEM describes as “a radical democratic, communal, ecological, women-liberated society.”

This piece was originally published on Medium as part of Local Futures’ Planet Local webseries.

Read about other holistic ecological initiatives from around the world on our Planet Local: Ecology page.

Dig deeper into Rojava and the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement on the following pages (the source material for much of this piece):

• ‘The revolution in Rojava: an eyewitness account’. Article published by ROAR Magazine; October 2016. https://roarmag.org/essays/revolution-rojava-pluto-book/
• Final Declaration of the First Conference of the Mesopotamian Ecology Movement; April 2016. http://www.biehlonbookchin.com/mesop-ecology-mvmt/
• ‘Kobane: An eco-challenge for humanity’. Article published by Slow Food International; December 2016. https://www.slowfood.com/kobane-an-eco-challenge-for-humanity/
• The official website of MEM (in Turkish): http://www.mezopotamyaekoloji.org/

Lead image: Hasankeyf, a predominantly Kurdish historic town in Turkey, and the proposed site of a large hydroelectric dam which would threaten the local ecosystem and water supply. MEM has been active in opposing the project

The post Agriculture and Autonomy in the Middle East appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Future architecture should look for ways of living (al)together, as all power structures and capitalist formations push us more and more away from each other. Merve Bedir talks with Future Architecture about her work, including the project Bostan: A Garden for All which she presented at the 2015 Idea Camp and for which she’d received an R&D grant.

Merve Bedir is an architect and researcher. Her research and practice is about urban transformation, migration and forced displacement and architecture education.

For more information on Bedir’s idea for Botan: A Garden for all, see here:

The post Merve Bedir on the Architecture of Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Governments are so accustomed to dictating their will, through coercion if necessary, that they find it unimaginable that people might willingly – and with creativity and enthusiasm – self-organize themselves to take care of urgent needs.  So pause a moment to behold the remarkable Zaatari Refugee camp in Jordan.  This settlement of 85,000 displaced Syrians is showing how even desperate, resource-poor people can show enormous creativity and self-organization, and turn their “camp” into a “city.”

In many respects, Zaatari bears an uncanny resemblance to the DIY dynamics of the Burning Man encampment in the Nevada desert – an annual gathering that attracts more than 65,000 people for a week.  Both eschew “government” in favor of self-organized governance.  Both confer opportunities and responsibilities and individuals, and facilitate bottom-up initiatives through lightweight infrastructures.

As the New York Times reported on July 4, the Zaatari camp has “neighborhoods, gentrification, a growing economy and, under the circumstances, something approaching normalcy, though every refugee longs to return home. There is even a travel agency that will provide a pickup service at the airport, and pizza delivery, with an address system for the refugees that camp officials are scrambling to copy.”  Times’ urbanist/architecture critic Michel Kimmelman declares that “Zaatari’s evolution points more broadly to a whole new way of thinking about one of the most pressing crises on the planet.”

Historically, most refugee camps are seen as impermanent camps whose desperate, wretched populations need “service delivery” of all sorts.  The “professionals” must orchestrate and administer everything.  The role assigned to the sad, needy hordes of refugees is to queue up in lines for food and to idle away their hours and days.

In Azraq, a refugee camp of 11,000 Syrians in the middle of nowhere, the “city” is “strictly policed, with fixed, corrugated metal shelters in military order, dirt floors and shameful public toilets, and it has no electricity.”  Refugees there are “terrified at night without electricity to light the shelters, unprotected against the scorpions, mice and snakes, say they escaped one nightmare to arrive at another.”

But what if you conceive a refugee camp not as an impermanent waystation (which often endures for years) to be “administered” from the top down, but as a project in self-organized, participatory, bottom-up city-building?

Kimmelman notes that the oldest parts of Zaatari “have streets, one or two paved, some lined with electric poles, the most elaborate houses cobbled together from shelters, tents, cinder blocks and shipping containers, with interior courtyards, private toilets and jerry-built sewers.  Clusters of satellite dishes and water tanks on the skyline can bring to mind favelas in Rio de Janeiro or slums in Cairo.  Like favelas, the camp has grown according to its own ad hoc, populist urban logic, which includes a degree of social mobility.”

The Zaatari experience illustrates “a basic push toward urbanization that happens even in desperate places – people leaving their stamp wherever they live, making the spaces they occupy their own.”

A German relief agency official describes Zaatari as “a complex ecosystem that you could call a city or a slum.  Either way, it’s a dynamic place, unforeseen by the humanitarian actors running it, which is giving refugees a sense of ownership and dignity.”

Kilian Kleinschmidt, the United Nations official in charge of Zaatari, describes the city as having “14,000 households, 10,000 sewage pots and private toilets, 3,000 washing machines, 150 private gardens, 3,500 new businesses and shops.”  It has barbershop, a pet store, a flower shop and a homemade ice cream business. Its main drag is called the Champs-Élysées. The owner of a bridal shop on the Champs-Élysées bought his property in the black market for 7,000 Jordanian dinars, or about US$10,000, which he may re-sell at a profit in the future.

To be sure, there have been some important top-down administration and leadership decisions making all of this bottom-up self-organization possible.  As the camp’s administrator, Kleinschmidt had to engage with and neutralize the organized crime bodies that were more or less running the camp, and he had to support and encourage grassroots projects.  But his critical realization was seeing his challenge not as UN management of a refugee camp, but as enabling refugees to build their own city:  a critical shift of perspective.

To be sure, Zaatari is a squalid place with lots of problems.  But it is surely a big advance when the management strategy recognizes the agency, imagination and dignity of refugees themselves, and tries to leverage those energies to improve everyone’s circumstances.  This strikes me as the essence of commoning.

Kleinschmidt is now exploring ways to get wifi for the camp and obtain 10,000 bicycles from an urban planning office in Amsterdam.  This, reports Kimmelman, “prompted a few canny Syrian refugees to open bike repair shops even before the bikes arrived.”

Perhaps DIY refugee camps like Zaatari will eventually teach municipal governments around the world a few things about unleashing the cooperative capacities of people and making their cities more robust, productive and liveable.  Zaatari should perhaps be considered a charter member of the Maker City movement.

This post originally appeared at bollier.org

The post Lessons of DIY Urbanism in a Syrian Refugee Camp appeared first on P2P Foundation.