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| | Dear Reader,
In recent times, much has been unfolding at Kosmos.
I’d like to share joyful personal news. Last month, Plum Village recognized me as a dharma teacher in the tradition of our teacher, Thích Nhất Hạnh. It is both a humbling honor and a responsibility - one that deepens my commitment to community, to Kosmos and walking gently on the earth.
This newsletter feels aligned with that path. We are exploring what it means to lose, and to remember the village., our felt sense of belonging and mutual care.
Jeremy Lent traces the historical forces that dismantled commons-based village life and reshaped our world around extraction and scarcity. And in an extraordinary paper, James Quilligan offers a framework for reclaiming shared stewardship in our time - a biosocial contract to rebalance commons, public goods and private property.
Sallamah Aliah’s essay brings us into the lived experience of urban communities already practicing forms of racial justice and belonging, including VOLAR, the Village of Love and Resistance in East Baltimore.
This is our initial foray into what will become a 9-month exploration of The Village Way. |
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You may also notice that our website has evolved. We are beginning to organize Kosmos content as living “islands”—clusters of resources, voices, and practices gathered around current themes of science and consciousness, earth wisdom, and a return to the village as relational practice. Rather than fixed issues of Kosmos, we will share what feels most alive, allowing these pieces to gather over time into deeper, evolving collections.
We hope this makes it easier to explore, connect, and grow our understanding together.
Finally, we’d like to point you to a course offered by our friends at 3rd Space that steps back from the rush of AI headlines to explore the deeper, evolutionary context of our relationship with this technology. Living with Uncertainty, grows out of an essay by Steve Brett, Living with Uncertainty: AI, Symbiogenesis and the Human, published in Kosmos Journal earlier this year, and draws on the work of thinkers such as Lynn Margulis, Jean Gebser, Gilbert Simondon, and Vanessa Andreotti. More details below.
As always, thank you for being part of this beloved community.
In peace, Rhon Fabian |
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excerpt
…”The millions of peasants who were forced off their land, losing their communities and means of subsistence, faced a grim reality. Starving, homeless, and bereft of any support system, they became refugees in their own country. Quantifying the magnitude of this catastrophe, economic historians estimate that wages declined by as much as seventy percent between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, while average life expectancy at birth fell from 43 years to the low 30s.
New words such as “poverty,” “paupers,” and “vagabonds” became commonplace in the English language to describe the results of this cataclysm. But rather than responding compassionately, the authorities classified these new conditions of destitution as crimes requiring draconian punishments.
Along with the physical devastation came something less visible but equally profound: the dissolution of the village itself. Old-style peasant villages had made up for their meagerness in material wealth with a richly complex fabric of relationships, grounded in long-standing customs of mutual aid and cooperation. As these commons-based communities were dismantled, that social fabric unraveled. People were left unmoored, not only materially but spiritually, severed from the patterns of belonging that had sustained them.” |
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Modeling a Self-Sustaining Planetary Commons A Biosocial Compact for the Governance and Revaluation of Earth Systems
By James Quilligan
Abstract
The world is entering a new chapter in its history. Competition over energy and material resources is intensifying as waste heat accumulates in the atmosphere and Earth surfaces, yet governance regimes are ill-equipped to manage today’s cascading ecological, fiscal and geopolitical crises. The sovereign state order of extractive global commons is splintering along two distinct trajectories: expansive multilateral/multipolar economies and decentralized planetary commons bound by ecology. |
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This article develops the latter as a basis for a biosocial contract to rebalance commons, public goods and private property on a planet of eight to ten billion people.
Anchored in subsidiarity, sovereign restructuring calls on nations to devolve new domains of decision-making to local, municipal and bioregional commons, while transferring responsibility to planetary institutions for binding limits on resource disruption and the requisitioning of public goods beyond the scope of nation-states and corporations. In turn, states will focus on fiscal allocation and redistribution, while corporations concentrate on the production and dissemination of goods and services.
Since existing price and currency systems are continually undervaluing the ecological constraints that stem from declining net energy and increasing systemic risk, the article introduces a planetary accounting stack derived from H.T. Odum’s transformity metrics of emergy. To generate public familiarity and legitimacy for collective governance of embodied sunlight, biocapacity revaluation, adaptive cycles and biophysical renewal, an education campaign in support of these new constitutional and monetary systems is proposed.
2026-2050 is the last secure horizon for planetary negotiators to agree on a compact for biosocial governance under conditions of peaceful adaptation, safe contraction and conscientious decline. |
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| | Urban Villages and the Solidarity Economy Rebuilding Community in Place By Sallamah Aliah |
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Excerpt:
…”Marisela Gomez, organizing in East Baltimore, explained redlining like this: the federal government and banking institutions mapped cities in ways that ensured Black communities were denied loans, land ownership, and the wealth that comes with it.
Co-founded by Gomez, The Village of Love and Resistance (VOLAR) is a Black- and Brown-led community cooperative. The work emerged in response to long-standing disinvestment and seeks to reclaim land, rebuild abandoned housing, and create a base of community power through healing and mutual aid. They are following models such as Market Creek Plaza in San Diego and Mercy Corps Northwest in Portland—efforts that center residents not just as participants, but as decision-makers and owners.
They are part of the Solidarity Economy, a global movement that prioritizes people and the planet over endless profit and growth. It is grounded in practices that already exist: cooperative housing, community land trusts, worker cooperatives, and mutual aid networks. VOLAR is part of this movement. They connect daily life to the broader work of community rebuilding. Neighborhood residents are shaping the vision and building toward cooperative housing and a shared community hub, spaces that are collectively owned and cared for.” |
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A New Course Offered by 3rd Space
If you’ve been feeling like something is missing from the AI conversation — that the technical and economic framing doesn’t capture what’s really at stake, our course might be the answer:
Living with Uncertainty A COURSE DESIGNED TO PROVIDE REAL ORIENTATION IN A DISORIENTING TIME.
Our Learning Pathway is designed to be more than just a curriculum; it is a roadmap for transformation, offering the tools and guidance necessary to navigate life’s challenges and unlock new opportunities. Move beyond the binary of ‘breathless optimism’ and ‘existential dread’ around AI, with a course designed to provide real orientation in a disorienting time, drawing on the work of thinkers such as Lynn Margulis, Jean Gebser, Gilbert Simondon, and Vanessa Andreotti. The course will be facilitated by Steve Brett and Faheem Nusrat.
Sessions are spaced two weeks apart Module 1: 17 May – 26 July 2026 (Sessions 1–6) Module 2: 6 September – 15 November 2026 (Sessions 7–12) |
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