Many people in the Austin area know the Third Coast Activist Resource Center from our work opposing the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the larger critique of the U.S. empire. Others first encountered Third Coast at 5604 Manor, the community center we bought and developed in collaboration with the Workers Defense Project. And, […]

 The Next System Project helps us face creatively the systemic challenges we face now and in the near future. The second volume of the project’s “New Systems Series” includes: Building A Cooperative Solidarity Commonwealth: Jessica Gordon Nembhard describes a system that seeks to establish and strengthen economic participation from the bottom up through interlinking networks of […]

Where can we look for the new ideas needed for a decent human future? The Next System Project gathers the work of people thinking the systemic challenges we face now and in the near future. From the project’s web site: Responding to real hunger for a new way forward, and building on innovative thinking and […]

When mainstream media don’t offer the critical analyses that we need to understand the multiple, cascading ecological crises of our time, where can we look for information and insight? There are many good sources, including Resilience.com. A project of the Post Carbon Institute, this website offers no-nonsense writing on energy, agriculture, and the economy. Collecting […]

Third Coast’s Robert Jensen has published a new book, Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully, an account of his intellectual, political, and emotional relationship with his late friend Jim Koplin. A reviewer in the Minneapolis Star Tribune writes: If at the beginning of “Plain Radical” you wonder what kind of […]

As politicians jockey for position on the Iran nuclear deal, the political and media conversations assume that Iran poses an existential threat that requires an international response led by the United States. Nuclear weapons surely pose a threat not only to peace but to our existence, but what nations pose the greatest threats? With his […]

Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the new book “Between the World and Me,” reminds us that the term “post-racial” is a farce: As many of our sharper activists and writers have pointed out, America’s struggle is to become not post-racial, but post-racist. Put differently, we should seek not a world where the black race and the […]

Karen Attiah, the Washington Post’s Opinions Deputy Digital Editor, masterfully skewers both the mainstream media and the arrogance of the United States in “How Western media would cover Baltimore if it happened elsewhere.” She begins the piece If what is happening in Baltimore happened in a foreign country, here is how Western media would cover it: […]

Noam Chomsky, with his characteristic candor, ponders whether human civilization “may now be approaching its inglorious end” in an essay on the twin threats of war and ecological crises. That essay draws on a thought-provoking analysis by Arundhati Roy, “Is Democracy Melting?“: Arundhati Roy suggests that the “most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our […]

Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, offers a blunt statement of today’s central problem: “[O]ur economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.” The book, and a companion film directed […]