1. Explore the history and current work of the Walkouts Network (Swapathgami) at http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/walkoutsnetwork.htm. Swapathgami is Hindi for “making our own paths of learning and living.”
2. For more information about The Berkana Institute, see p. 265 or visit www.berkana.org.
3. Gratitude to Myron Rogers, who first coined the phrase “Start anywhere, follow it everywhere.”
4. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 5.
5. To learn more about co-motion, read Gustavo Esteva, “Back from the Future,” http://gustavoesteva.com/english_site/back_from_the_future.htm#_ftn1.
6. CIDECI stands for Centro Indigena de Capacitación Integral.
7. Dr. Raymundo Sánchez Barraza shared this in an interview with Nic Paget-Clarke published in In Motion Magazine. See “Interview with Raymundo Sánchez Barraza: A University Without Shoes,” http://inmotion magazine.com/global/rsb_int_eng.html, September 2005 (accessed August 17, 2010).
8. Opening remarks by Subcomandante Marcos at the First Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, July 27, 1996. Subcomandante Marcos and Juan Ponce de León, Our Word Is Our Weapon (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 102.
9. Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism (London: Zed Books, 1998), 6.
10. Gabriel Szulanski and Sidney Winter, “Getting It Right the Second Time,” Harvard Business Review, January 2002.
11. Opening remarks at the First Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, July 27, 1996. Marcos and Ponce de León, Our Word Is Our Weapon.
12. Email correspondence with Daniel Perera.
13. Transition Network, “Transition Initiatives Directory,” www.transition network.org/initiatives (accessed July 30, 2010).
14. Subcomandante Marcos, “Old Antonio’s History of the Upholder of the Sky,” translated by irlandesa, The Narco News Bulletin, www.narconews.com/Issue31/article832.html (accessed August 17, 2010).
15. By nominal GDP, according to the World Bank’s 2009 list, “Gross Domestic Product (2009).” The World Bank: World Development Indicators database, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GDP.pdf (accessed July 05, 2010).
16. Canadian International Development Agency. “A Synthesis of Canada’s Cooperation Strategy in Brazil,” http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/inet/images.nsf/vLUImages/Brazil/$file/Brazil-country-strategy-FINAL.pdf, March 2005 (accessed August 17, 2010).
17. Myles Horton and Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change, ed. Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, and John Peters (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 56.
18. In his book, The Careless Society (p. 154), John McKnight characterizes the conventional approach to community organizing, which emerged in the 1940s, as one that encourages neighborhoods to organize against “enemies” whose power can be manipulated.
19. The term upcycling is most commonly attributed to the 2002 publication of Cradle to Cradle, the pioneering book on ecologically intelligent design by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. Earlier citations of the word have been identified from 1996 on (see WordSpy at www.wordspy.com/words/upcycling.asp), although it’s unclear exactly where it was first coined.
20. As of April 2010. In 2009, it was 127,000.
21. Many of the voices of possibility are actual quotes from Paquetá community members, particularly Kátia dos Santos. Watch 2007 Warriors Without Weapons film at http://warriorswithoutweapons.wordpress.com/www-2011.
22. Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Holt, 2006), 18.
23. The Zulu word indaba has many meanings in South Africa. Traditionally, it referred to a council or meeting of indigenous peoples to discuss an important matter. Informally, it is used to gather people together for discussion.
24. This Zulu origin story is adapted from Credo Mutwa, Zulu Shaman: Dreams, Prophecies and Mysteries (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2003), 33-35.
25. From the journals of Thomas Richard Adlam. See Maryna Fraser, Edmund Bright, Thomas Richard Adlam, Johannesburg Pioneer Journals, 1888-1909 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1986), 77.
26. These scenes from Joubert Park come from recorded personal recollections from residents of Johannesburg.
27. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (New York: Back Bay Books, 1995), 149.
28. Ibid., 111.
29. Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (London: Rider Books, 1999), 34-35.
30. According to the Institute for Security Studies (www.iss.co.za, accessed August 17, 2010), the murder rate in Johannesburg Central could be as high as 1,000 per 100,000 residents—which is off the charts compared with an international average of 9.6 murders per 100,000 people.
31. The larger neighborhood that the government recognizes as Joubert Park covers about one hundred city blocks. Its official population is estimated to be nearly thirty thousand, although residents say the figures are much higher. City of Johannesburg E-Services, www.joburg.org.za (accessed August 17, 2010).
32. HIV statistics vary for age, gender, and race. According to the 2008 South African National HIV survey, while the overall infection rate in South Africa is about 11 percent, for black Africans in their twenties and thirties, the infection rate leaps as high as 29 percent—and likely higher in the Central Business District. And even higher in the late 1990s. O. Shisana, T. Rehle, L. C. Simbayi, K. Zuma, S. Jooste, V. Pillay-van-Wyk, N. Mbelle, J. Van Zyl, W. Parker, N. P. Zungu, S. Pezi, and the SABSSM III Implementation Team, “South African National HIV Prevalence, Incidence, Behavior and Communication Survey, 2008,” HSRC Press, www.mrc.ac.za/pressreleases/2009/sanat.pdf (accessed August 17, 2010).
33. These rankings come from www.NationMaster.com (accessed August 17, 2010), which sources data from the CIA World Factbook, the United Nations, and the International Centre for Prison Studies, among others.
34. While the official unemployment rate in South Africa peaked at 37 percent in 2003-2004 and is today closer to 22 percent, the unofficial rate—particularly among black Africans in the inner city—is much higher. Statistics South Africa, www.statssa.gov.za (accessed August 17, 2010).
35. John McKnight, The Careless Society (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 105-106.
36. Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 213.
37. Adapted from interviews with Dorah and quotes from The GreenHouse Project film featured on Global Oneness (www.globalonenessproject.org/videos/thegreenhouseproject).
38. The GreenHouse Project has had a turbulent relationship with its primary funder, the National Lotteries Board, and is focused on developing income-generating activities that will lead to greater economic self-reliance.
39. Quote from Masupatsela Series 11, Episode 12, a film about The GreenHouse Project (www.freerangefilms.co.za/Masupatsela2/episodes/episode12agreenerworld/).
41. www.transitionnetwork.org/welcome (July 2010).
42. The annual inflation rate in Zimbabwe as of November 2008. Steve H. Hanke, “New Hyperinflation Index (HHIZ) Puts Zimbabwe Inflation at 89.7 Sextillion Percent,” The Cato Institute, www.cato.org/zimbabwe (accessed August 18, 2010).
43. According to the World Food Program Zimbabwe Country Report, www.wfp.org/countries/zimbabwe (accessed August 18, 2010).
44. This means the HIV rate is 15.3 percent, which is 1 in 7. Daniel Howden, “Zimbabwe’s Bad Practice: 3,500 Dead Each Week as Meltdown Looms,” The Independent, December 1, 2006, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/zimbabwes-bad-practice-3500-dead-each-week-as-meltdown-looms-426580.html (accessed August 18, 2010).
45. While toilet trivia fanatics abound on the Internet, no one has run an exact figure here. Estimates are that gallons per flush range from 1.6 to 5 (averaging 3); flushes per day average 4 to 5; and the U.S. population is more than 309 million. Which leaves us with an average of, say, 4.2 billion gallons per day.
46. Vandana Shiva points out that on average, Green Revolution agriculture requires ten times more water input than nonchemical agriculture. And today, industrial agriculture requires three hundred times more chemical inputs than when it was first introduced. Watch “A Critique of the Green Revolution” on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfKi47Vfriw.
47. Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics (London: Zed Books, 1992), 15.
48. World Bank Zimbabwe Country Report, http://data.worldbank.org/country/zimbabwe (accessed August 18, 2010).
49. Several years later in 2008, Kufunda did install a drip irrigation system (funded through a grant). At the time, frequent power cuts compromising their ability to pump water made gardening increasingly difficult. To feed themselves and continue gardening, they decided to install the system with the intention of learning from it how to design similar systems using cheaper and recycled materials that would be more affordable for their partner communities.
50. Direct experience and Kufunda 2005 annual report.
51. The film Power of Community depicts the story of the agricultural revolution in Cuba. www.powerofcommunity.org.
52. Brian Walker and David Salt, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Seattle: Island Press, 2006).
53. Ibid., 9.
54. Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 213.
55. United Nations, “The Millennium Development Goals Report 2009,” www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/MDG_Report_2009_ENG.pdf (accessed August 18, 2010).
56. Ibid., 3.
57. For more on this perspective on Haiti, read “What You’re Not Hearing About Haiti (But Should Be)” by Carl Lindskoog, Common Dreams, January 14, 2010, www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/14-2 (accessed August 18, 2010).
58. Walker and Salt, Resilience Thinking, 14.
59. Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) was the political and spiritual leader of India during the Indian independence movement. Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was a prolific philosopher and spiritual teacher known worldwide for his practice of challenging assumptions. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Nobel Prize-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and musician. Vandana Shiva (born in 1952) is an environmental activist and eco-feminist who has catalyzed a worldwide movement against industrial agriculture. Arundhati Roy (born in 1961), best known for her novel The God of Small Things, is an activist focused on social justice and economic inequality.
60. This dialogue is based on quotes drawn directly from the work of each leader and assembled to create this fictional conversation.
61. Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) was a philosopher who was said to have integrated Eastern and Western cultures in his work; he was also a political activist, spiritual leader, poet, and yogi. Vinoba Bhave (1895-1982) was the spiritual successor of Gandhi and an advocate of nonviolence and human rights.
62. PBS, “Holy Cow: Hinduism’s Sacred Animal,” Thirteen/WNET New York and Icon Films, 2004,www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/holycow/hinduism.html (accessed August 18, 2010).
63. According to Chetan Singh Mehta in his book Environmental Protection and the Law (New Delhi: APH Publishing, 2009). Cattle figure adjusted from Mehta’s estimate of 300 million to 280 million.
64. Learn more about producing amrit jal and amrit mitti from Natueco City Farming, http://natuecocityfarming.blogspot.com.
65. From You Are, Therefore I Am, by Satish Kumar, cited in Reclaiming the Gift Culture, a 131-page booklet produced by Shikshantar.
66. Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 9.
67. Adapted from Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Jewish Wisdom: Ethical, Spiritual and Historical Lessons from the Great Works and Thinkers (New York: Morrow, 1994), 183.
68. Manish Jain and Shilpa Jain, eds., Vimukt Shiksha: Reclaiming the Gift Culture (Rajasthan: Shikshantar, 2009), 78-80.
69. To learn more about the Berkana Fellows program, read The Leaders We Need Are Already Here, by Nitin Paranjape, a booklet and accompanying video available at www.berkana.org. This program was a prototype for Swaraj University (www.swarajuniversity.org), a two-year self-directed learning program.
70. Bernard Lietaer, The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World (Post Falls, ID: Century, 2001), 146.
71. To illustrate, in the United States, banks are required to hold 10 percent of a loan in reserve. If the bank receives a $100 deposit, it may lend out $90 of that deposit. When the borrower uses that loan to pay someone else who deposits the $90 in the bank, the bank can now lend out $81. The cycle continues until the bank turns that original $100 deposit into up to $1,000 in loans ($100 + 90 + 81 + 72.90 + … = $1,000). And this is how $900 is created out of thin air.
72. Thomas Greco, The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (n.p.: Green Press Initiative, 2009), 55.
73. Mahatma Gandhi, Trusteeship (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing, 1996).
74. Lietaer, Future of Money, 159, and direct interview. When Lietaer last did a “hard inventory” of currency systems, he found a minimum of 2,500 in operation. His estimate (as of 2010) is that there are between 2,500 and 5,000 community currencies operating in the dozen countries he is tracking.
75. Rabindranath Tagore, “Prisoner,” in Gitanjali (Charleston, SC: BookSurge Classics, 2003), 20.
76. Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life, trans. Gillian Clark (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 50.
77. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007), xx.
78. Professor James Chace of Bard College shared his views about the emergence of interventionism in a 2002 interview on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: “History of Intervention.” PBS, July 31, 2002, www.pbs.org/news-hour/bb/middle_east/july-dec02/historians_7-31.html (accessed August 18, 2010).
79. Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), xviii.
80. Ibid., 35.
81. Peter Kenyon, “Obscured by War, Water Crisis Looms in Yemen,” NPR, November 20, 2009, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php? storyId=120619082 (accessed August 18, 2010).
82. Richard Harris, “Reef Conservation Strategy Backfires,” NPR, November 18, 2009, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120536304 (accessed August 18, 2010).
83. Oxfam Briefing Papers, “Stop the Dumping: How EU Agricultural Subsidies Are Damaging Livelihoods in the Developing World,” Oxfam International, October 2002, www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/trade/downloads/bp31_dumping.pdf (accessed August 18, 2010).
84. Moyo, Dead Aid, 46.
85. Plato, Symposium, 175d. In The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 530.
86. Estimates range from $2.4 to as high as $6 billion. Linda Rodriguez, “Toilet Paper History: How America Convinced the World to Wipe,” Mental Floss, November 7, 2009, www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/40088 (accessed August 18, 2010).
87. Toilet Paper History, “Toilet Paper Fun Facts,” www.toiletpaperhistory.net/toilet-paper-facts/toilet-paper-fun-facts (accessed August 18, 2010).
88. Leslie Kaufman, “Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests,” New York Times, February 25, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/science/earth/26charmin.html?_r=1&em (accessed August 18, 2010).
89. Cottonelle slogan.
90. Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 236.
91. In Tools for Conviviality, Illich chooses an unconventional use of the term convivial. He writes, “I have chosen ‘convivial’ as a technical term to designate a modern society of responsibly limited tools.”
92. Ivan Illich, Jerry Brown, and Carl Mitcham, “Land of Found Friends,” Whole Earth, Summer 1997, http://ournature.org/-novembre/illich/1997_friendship.html (accessed October 27, 2010).
93. Defined by Grameen as living on less than $1 per day. In 2008, the World Bank revised the poverty line figure to $1.25.
94. Muhammad Yunus, Creating a World Without Poverty (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2007), 114.
95. Liz Osborn, “Cloudiest Cities in America,” Current Results Nexus, www.currentresults.com/Weather-Extremes/US/cloudiest-cities.php (accessed August 19, 2010).
96. For years, Columbus consistently ranked as a top test market for consumer products. Recent studies indicate that the city may no longer be equally representative of the U.S. population. Business First of Columbus, “Study: Columbus Not So Good as Test Market.” www.bizjournals.com/columbus/stories/2004/05/31/daily2.html (accessed August 19, 2010).
97. See www.artofhosting.org. This quote is in Margaret Wheatley, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2009), 177.
98. From www.osu.edu/osutoday/stuinfo.php and elsewhere at www.osu.edu.
99. Open Space: www.openspaceworld.org.
100. PeerSpirit: www.peerspirit.com.
101. Interview with Toke Moller, March 2010.
102. Quotes from Phil come from direct interviews and from a workshop he and Toke hosted in Nova Scotia where they told the Columbus health care story. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxK51N_IwlY&NR=1.
103. These statistics come from Our Optimal Health documents and are based on 2004 figures.
104. From Zapatista Stories, translated by Dinah Livingstone, www.katabasis.co.uk/pantonio.html.
105. Ivan Illich, “To Hell with Good Intentions,” www.swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm (accessed November 10, 2010).