Sovereignty: A Practice

The Heart of It

Sovereignty without domination

The historian Riane Eisler describes two ways human societies have organized themselves. In the domination model, power is held over: over women, children, other peoples, animals, the land, even over one's own body. In the partnership model, power is held with, and the measure of a society is how well it cares for life.

That distinction is the test for every teaching about sovereignty, including the ones in this library. Some paths end in a single, absolute will: the self as a god, the world as a variable, every other being as interference. That's control turned inward, and it can quietly rebuild the very system it set out to leave. The sovereignty this site practices goes the other way: it becomes more rooted in the body, the soil, and the community, not less.

Stop looking to the world to tell you who you are. Look inside, and decide what the world must become.

Look inside to decide, then turn back toward the world to build it, with others.

Definitions

The kinds of sovereignty

• Bodily sovereignty. Your body is yours: what goes into it, what is done to it, who touches it. The ground of every other kind.
• Sovereignty of attention. Choosing what enters your mind, and noticing what is trying to steer your feelings. See reading the news without swallowing the charge.
• Emotional sovereignty. Feeling everything without handing the wheel to anyone else: “not outsourcing the driver.”
• Food sovereignty. Defined by La Via Campesina, the world's largest farmers' movement, in 1996: the right of peoples to healthy, culturally appropriate food, and to shape their own food systems.
• Seed sovereignty. The right to save, share, and replant seed. A handful of corporations now control most of the world's commercial seed. Every seed library is a quiet act of independence.
• Economic sovereignty. Less debt, more local exchange: trade, gifts, co-ops, and skills that can't be taken away.
• Data sovereignty. Knowing who collects your information, and choosing tools that don't. This site is one example.
• Community sovereignty. Neighbors who can feed, heal, teach, and protect one another. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for showing that communities can govern shared land and water well, without either the state or the market.
• The sovereignty of the living world. Ecuador wrote the rights of nature into its constitution in 2008, and New Zealand recognized the Whanganui River as a legal person in 2017. Sovereignty, in the end, belongs to the land too.

A Dial, Not a Turnstile

Turning toward the land, from wherever you are

It can feel as if there are only two doors: stay plugged into the grid with all its conveniences, or walk out onto the land. But most people can't walk out tomorrow, and no one should be judged for where they stand today. Sovereignty works like a dial. Every turn counts.

One turn: this week

• Grow one thing you eat, even herbs on a windowsill.
• Learn your neighbors' names. Ask one of them for help with something small.
• Buy one thing from a person instead of a corporation: a farmer, a maker, a seed keeper.
• Check the news once a day, on purpose.
• Spend an hour outside without a screen, and listen.

A few turns: this season

• Save seed from one plant, and give some away.
• Join a farm share, a community garden, or a seed library, or start one.
• Learn one skill that makes you less dependent: preserving food, mending, first aid, basic repair.
• Start a tool library, a meal rotation, or a childcare swap with people you trust.
• Move some savings to a local credit union.

Many turns: the long road

• Land held in common through a community land trust or a cooperative.
• Shared energy: community solar, local microgrids.
• Intentional communities, ecovillages, and multigenerational homes.
• A local economy that keeps its wealth circulating close to home.

From the Hallway

We are not the timeline that lets that spirit die

The United States is a country formed by people who believed so intently in a manifest destiny that they were willing to endure hardships and put themselves and those they love in tremendous peril. They risked their lives and faced danger, sickness, and sometimes death, just for the possibility of a chance to build a brand-new life from the ground up, in a brand-new place on a distant shore, sometimes with only the clothes on their backs. It is this determination and force of will that founded this nation: a people that prioritized freedom and liberty above all else.

We are not the timeline that lets that spirit die. Wake up. Stand up. They didn't risk everything for a freedom that we let die. That's not who we are. They fought to give us a future and pass it forward to future generations. Now we thank them, and keep it safe for the generations after us. Do we really want to be the people who let what they fought and died for be taken and destroyed? We are here from bravery, in service to freedom and sovereign living. When did we forget that? Because that's everything.

Manifest destiny is really envisioning something and making it real.

Democracy is sovereignty held in common. The Declaration of Independence says governments draw their power “from the consent of the governed”: the power belongs to the people first. And freedom here was never handed down finished. Not everyone arrived by choice; millions came in chains, and Indigenous nations were already home. Each generation fought to widen the circle: abolitionists, suffragists, the civil rights movement. That is what passing it forward has always meant. Frederick Douglass, in 1852, held the nation to its own founding ideals, and that is the spirit worth keeping alive.

To go deeper, visit We the People: Democracy and Self-Government in the Reading Rooms.

The Hopeful Horizon

Solarpunk

Solarpunk is a movement in art, fiction, and real life that imagines a future of abundance instead of collapse: gardens on every rooftop, solar panels beside seed libraries, craft and repair, local food, and communities that live in harmony with the land. The name appeared online around 2008. It isn't against technology; it asks technology to serve life rather than rule it.

It may be what the planet is asking for. Whether you read this year's wild weather as karma or as climate science, the message points the same way: a call to come back into relationship with every other living creature. Many people feel that call most clearly outdoors, in the garden, in the woods, with their hands in the soil.

What researchers have found: time in nature lowers stress hormones, and the Japanese practice of forest bathing has been linked to stronger immune activity (Qing Li). Erica Chenoweth's research on a century of movements found that nonviolent campaigns succeeded about twice as often as violent ones, and that campaigns drawing about 3.5% of the population almost always won. Change doesn't require a fight. It requires enough people walking steadily in the same direction.

To go deeper, visit Land, Seeds, and Community, Matriarchy, Partnership, and the Woman-Led Vision, and Debt, Money, and the Sovereign Individual in the Reading Rooms, or A Woman Alive Today.

Last reviewed October 2026.

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