Abundance for Everybody

Over the past several years the Democracy Center has covered the impacts of climate change and responses to this crisis in many ways. We’ve looked at the impact of climate change on water in Bolivia, how California activists beat back the power of the Koch brothers, and unmasked the decimating activities of a set of multinational corporations operating in the Andes and Amazon.

But responding to climate change is about more than understanding its impacts around the world and it is about more than political action. It is also about how we live our lives and building new and creative ways of doing so that move away from the habits of consumption and increased individualisation that help foment the crisis at hand.

‘Abundance for Everybody’ looks at how a group of young, urban activists are working day by day to build genuine alternatives in the centre of Bolivia’s hectic capital, La Paz. The Casa de los Ningunos is an experimental community project that aims to challenge the systemic causes of the climate crisis from the roots up. Through group and personal interviews with residents of the house, we have developed a set of materials that explore three main pillars of the project: food, community and economy. These touch on issues of community organizing, system change as a response to climate change, food as an accessible approach to activism, alternative economy and self-sufficiency, privilege, healing our personal relationships and love as a fundamental component of social change.

By sharing the experiences of the Casa de los Ningunos, both as a source of inspiration and to bring to light some of the challenges implied in these types of projects, this work aims to contribute to the global process of transitioning towards new ways of, as the Bolivians say, “living well”.