“We’ve been told a tired story of voting as a duty, an obligation, a chore on a checklist ... What we’ve been missing is the articulation of a vision for our democracy that captures what we want it to be and how we want it to feel.” In the Patagonia Fall 2026 Journal, Baratunde Thurston (@baratunde) invites us to redefine democracy as a living, interdependent system that requires tending, like a garden or a relationship. To better understand human-made systems of interdependence, we can look as far back as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s centuries-old system of governance and as recently as modern protest movements. Read the article in the journal (available for free, while supplies last, at all Patagonia retail stores in North America) or at the link in bio. Photos: A tipi is raised at the 2016 Standing Rock protest opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. Josué Rivas (@josue_foto)