Beautiful Solutions: A Toolbox for Liberation
Edited by Elandria Williams, Rachel Plattus, Eli Feghali, and Nathan Schneider (OR Books, 2024 under Creative Commons)
From 1968 to 1971, a guy named Stewart Brand published a series of Whole Earth Catalogs: resources to help people who were part of the back-to-the-land movement. Beautiful Solutions switches the focus to activists, makes it global, and brings the concept forward to our own time.
The book makes no secret of its biases toward collectives and co-ops rather than corporate capitalism, toward factory and agricultural workers controlling their own destiny and their own working conditions rather than taking orders from some isolated executive, and toward collaborative, multidisciplinary/intersectional, egalitarian forms of decision making and shared responsibility rather than rigid hierarchies and departmental silos.
The book design and the organization of the text work together to keep things as accessible as possible. The material is divided into several overarching sections: Introduction; Food & Agriculture; Land & Housing; Education; Media & Information; Health, Art, Culture, & Spirit; Utilities & Energy; Manufacturing; Finance; Justice & Safety; Governance; and Outro (back matter), each with an introductory two pages addressing these questions: “What is at stake? What is possible? What could happen if we lose? What are some of the strongest forces against us? What are some of the most promising strategies? How are we making beautiful trouble? How can we heal? Who can we learn from?”
Each section is broken up into much smaller pieces, typically two to five pages, each labeled as a Story, Solution, Principle, or Question. Each acknowledges the people who wrote it—and also the mentors who showed the writers what they were doing and guided them to understanding—with brief blurbs. And each has at least one place to go to learn more: a website, a book, a film, etc. The layout is designed to scan easily and keep like concepts together.
Although right at the beginning, the book emphatically declares that it is NOT an encyclopedia, manual, or shortcut (p. 7), I’m calling it a resource manual. Here’s the mission statement/self-description:
Beautiful Solutions is a collaborative project that highlights many interlocking pieces of a complex puzzle. It helps us to see where pieces are missing and brings us closer to putting the whole thing together. By featuring examples from every area of our economy… Beautiful Solutions demonstrates that another world is under construction (p. 2).
The book aims to “Put you in charge…Give you the tools…Get you connected…Change the story” (each of these begins a descriptive paragraph, p. 5). And it recognizes that this journey has many paths. As an example, the first page in the first content section (food and agriculture, p. 29) jumps right in with eleven regenerative strategies before getting into specific projects.
You’ll meet dozens of people like:
- Bren Smith, a fisherman who was wiped out by Hurricane Sandy, then launched Greenwave, a “regenerative ocean farming” experiment that has trained 8000 farmers to “grow only zero-input species that won’t swim away and don’t need to be fed.” That might include kelp, scallops, mussels, and oysters, among others (p. 40).
- Rubin and Dawn Welesky, founders of Conflict Kitchen, a restaurant that rotates cuisines from various conflict zones around the world, thus de-demonizing so-called enemies (pp. 174-176); the restaurant even used online technology to join two sets of diners in Tehran and Pittsburg, cooking and eating the same meals at the same time.
- Nancy Neamtan of Le Chantier de L’economie Sociale, a Quebec-based organization that promotes economic growth through federations of smaller businesses, rather than scaling up to a crushing corporate behemoth focused only on the single bottom line (p. 319).
And discover projects and concepts like: the solidarity economy (pp. 85-86); Berea College (Kentucky)—built on racial equality and low tuition made possible by student labor (pp. 91-94); La Coperacha, a Mexico-based cooperative of journalists doing deep reporting without the constraints of corporate or government media owners (pp. 126-129); a broad range of disability justice perspectives that includes less common, less visible issues like literacy (pp. 137-138), medication affordability through public ownership (pp. 144-147), and much more; a Philippine city that embraced zero-waste and lowered its costs from 70 mm to just 12 mm pesos per year (p. 208); a worker-owned sewing co-op that kept mills busy and mill workers employed during COVID, making masks and other protective equipment (p. 227); the restorative justice process that a hate-crime perpetrator and the community he attacked went through in New Zealand (pp. 276-277); a global citizen-participatory municipal budgeting process that began in Brazil (pp. 305-308)…
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