Long after the empire that built them collapsed, Roman aqueducts kept moving water, because they were built to be maintained, not merely to be finished. That single design choice says more about lasting civilizations than any amount of modern engineering.
In the cider houses of Gipuzkoa, Basque families have kept the same barrels, the same bitter apple varieties, and the same standing-up ritual running for centuries, not by preserving anything but by simply doing it again every winter.
In the Alpujarras of Andalusia, thousand-year-old irrigation channels called acequias survive not as heritage pieces but as working commons, sustained by an annual labor duty that ties water rights to physical maintenance rather than ownership.
There's a product category that almost no company has ever made money from, at least not deliberately. It's the repair market. Most consumer goods manufacturers spent decades designing products that wear out on convenient schedules, then watched the secondary repair economy...
Here is a number that should give anyone in sustainable tourism pause: according to most industry estimates, between 40% and 80% of gross tourism revenue in developing destination economies leaks out before it reaches local communities. Forty to eighty percent. That's not a...
Here's a number worth sitting with: the World Bank projects that by 2050, up to 216 million people could be displaced within their own countries by climate change alone. Not refugees crossing borders for political reasons. People moving because the place they were born can no...
There's a thought experiment that keeps me up at night, and I've been running it for a few years now. Picture a tourism cooperative in Umbria, a small cluster of family-run agriturismi in the hills above Todi. They've agreed, informally, to cap visitor numbers, share referrals,...
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There's a product category that almost no company has ever made money from, at least not deliberately. It's the repair market. Most consumer goods manufacturers spent decades designing products that wear out on convenient schedules, then watched the secondary repair economy...