DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Lifehouse

Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire

Adam Greenfield author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Verso Books

Published:9th Jul '24

Should be back in stock very soon

Lifehouse cover

AN URGENT AND PRACTICAL GUIDE TO COMMUNITY RESILIENCE IN THE FACE OF CLIMATE CATASTROPHE

A Lifehouse is an institution at the heart of each neighborhood that responds to the terrifying reality of climate collapse in our own communities.

In this book Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Technologies, recovers lessons from the Black Panther survival programs, the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort and the solidarity networks of crisis-era Greece, as well as municipalist Spain and autonomous Rojava, to show how practices of mutual care and local power can help shelter us from a future that often feels like it has no place for us or the values we cherish.

Mixing clear-eyed, unwavering analysis with deep compassion, Lifehouse offers something much more sustaining than hope: traction -- Jenny Odell, author of Saving Time
When three emergencies -- climate, political and social - build together into the storm of our present we need to start thinking from the ground-up. In this we have no better guide than AG. Lifehouse constructs a much needed, hands-on strategy for urban care. Read it and start planning. -- Eyal Weizman, author of Hollowland
A succinct, unflinching assessment of the urgent conditions unfolding around us, and a nuanced, practical analysis of why and how we must take up immediate, local, collective direct action. -- Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid
Anyone interested in collective survival will benefit from Greenfield's examinations of episodes of transformative communal care from New Orleans and NYC, Rojava, municipalist Spain, Greek solidarity clinics, and the Black Panthers' survival programs. That he then knots the threads of permanent disaster and local response into a clear-eyed proposal for enduring networks of mutual support networks is something like hope-in-action-refreshing, provocative, and within our reach.' -- Erin Kissane, co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project
Knowing we can't rely upon governments, corporations or elites to protect us from the ongoing disasters we now face, above all climate change, Adam Greenfeld movingly celebrates the grass-roots mutual aid and caring collectivities that have sustained people through past calamities. Aware that such self-organised, compassionate caring is more needed than ever today, Greenfield's vivid, erudite and persuasive prose outlines the many ways in which people can, and for their own survival must, work together confronting the challenging goal of creating local autonomous communities, or Lifehouses, now necessary for enduring the storms ahead. An inspiring text in pessimistic times. -- Lynne Segal, author of Lean on Me: A Radical Politics of Care
Greenfield explains how people, with their inherent adaptability, should reorganise and self-manage to cope with changing conditions and a harsher world with less room for everyone. * Protect Earth *

ISBN: 9781788738354

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 18mm

Weight: 216g

272 pages