ABSTRACT
Communities around the world are constructing alternatives, offering a better quality of life than our troubled existence in today’s capitalist society, while also contributing to environmental preservation. Their communitarian commitments are grounded in five basic principles that shape their social and political organisation, offering a realistic but challenging strategy for local progress: autonomy, social solidarity, self-sufficiency, productive diversification, and the sustainable management of their natural heritage. Many peasant and Indigenous groups are providing leadership, producing more than two-thirds of all food consumed by people around the globe. They are leading the way towards better systems for managing and protecting the planet, its valuable ecosystems, and its water, as well as its flora and fauna. Their cosmovisions offer new approaches to learning and better systems for cooperation to achieve more sustainable ways of living. Providing for the needs of all members by guaranteeing education and health services while ensuring the young and the elderly are cared for are inherent in their visions of a better life, the ‘buen vivir’ of the Andean civilisations or the Comunalidad of Mesoamerican peoples. Radical ecological economics is a discipline that incorporates communities into a collaboration with students and teachers to multiply these new worlds.
