Lifehouse

Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire

By: Adam Greenfield

Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray

How to reclaim power in a time of perpetual crisis

We are living through a Long Emergency: a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars, and other climate-driven disasters. In Lifehouse, Adam Greenfield asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care that spring up in response to these times might be brought together in a single, coherent way of life?

Using examples from the Black Panthers' "survival programs," the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-relief effort, and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns to the large-scale, self-organized polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, Greenfield argues for rethinking local power as a bulwark against despair-a way to discover and develop the individual and collective capacities that have gone underutilized during all the long years of late capitalism, and a means for thriving in the face of impending catastrophe.

©2024 Adam Greenfield (P)2024 Tantor

We must keep on keeping on

No holds barred, reality check on life now and possible futures. No silver bullets. No tickets to ride. Only the realities of human nature, our will to survive, and those who would keep us down. Hope for what lies ahead, but a stark reality check on the forces that would push against that hope.