Colonial capitalism represents itself as the only possible reality. Bodies, minds, practices, and relations are subjected to and assembled into an order that shapes what is desirable, actionable, and possible, forming the terrain upon and limits through which social change takes place.

Ecological destruction and historic inequalities stem from much more than moral failings, government inaction, lack of knowledge, or elite interests. Woven through the fabric of reality itself are centuries of colonial violence, capital accumulation, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Within this context, pathways to well-being rely on an understanding of nature as an inert warehouse of resources that are there for human use. And what it means to be human coalesces around individual competition, ownership, and accumulation.

Breaking out of this paradigm is not easy; it involves something deeper than ideological struggle. It involves breaking free of the notion that there is only a single reality—one world.

But the current one-world paradigm is losing coherence, as the edges and foundations of other worlds—already here but suppressed and marginalized, or yet to be imagined and still on the horizon—become more visible. 

BSE is invested in a learning and teaching effort that can help to assemble and advance the conditions from which other ways of being in the world become visible, viable, and powerful. We research, learn from, build connections, reflect, embody, and advance practices and relationships that foreground the well-being of people and planet over profit. This includes things like cooperatives of all kinds, community land trusts, alternative currencies and bartering, time banks, participatory democracy, permaculture, eco-villages, land back efforts, gift economies, community production, and so on; efforts that that privilege cooperative rather than competitive behaviors, that are democratic rather than hierarchical, that seek to bring together rather than individualize, and that reveal rather than conceal sociality and interdependence