Building a Solidarity Economy - MOLD :: Designing the Future of Food
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I first met Kali Akuno in 2018 — the same year that the “Deep Adaptation” paper was published1. Despite a lack of wider circulation, the paper went viral in climate movement circles. For many of us, the paper validated our years-long campaign to declare the current era as the sixth mass extinction, while also urging us to abandon our standard way of life and form alternative ones. Kali’s work with Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi takes this urging to the task. As detailed in his latest book, Jackson Rising Redux2, building the future in the present demands new designs, new formulas, and a new definition of how to be human. Catching up with Kali six years after, I believe we are closer to the future than we think.

Mutual aid has always been a core component of how we build solidarity, how we take care of a community. Due to the tornadoes that are now more frequent because of climate change, and the collapsing water and other types of infrastructure, we’re responding to some major crisis two or three times every year: delivering water, delivering food, coming up with portable generators and fundraising, and setting up community distribution centers. All of that becomes a major component of our work, and we’ve become very proficient at it, but it’s not within the framework of us adding productive capacity to the community to meet its own material needs.