Ellen LaConte

Ellen LaConte is a memoirist, former homesteader and editor of Farmstead and ForeFacts magazines, and publisher of Starting Point newsletter. Her widely endorsed new book, Life Rules: Nature’s Blueprint for Surviving Economic and Environmental Collapse was released by New Society Publishers in October 2012. LaConte’s very smallholding in the piedmont bioregion of North Carolina has recently been designated a certified wildlife habitat where, increasingly, Life does rule.

Society

Earth is not a global village: Start living more locally before it’s too late

The scary truth is that the economic, environmental, social, and political crises we’re facing are red flags warning us that the system we’re all counting on is headed for collapse, says LaConte. Global leaders are approaching these crises as though they were distinct and unrelated, when in reality, the problem is globalization itself.

January 14, 2013

Society

Global Warning

In Life Rules, I compare the world’s presently converging and mutually reinforcing environmental, economic, social and political crises to the syndrome of illnesses an HIV patient experiences when her disease shifts into full-blown AIDS. Among the symptoms of AIDS is rampant high fever. The viral fossil-fuel driven global industrial economy — Earth’s equivalent of HIV — has tipped the Earth’s climate from slow, sporadic, scattered warming events into full, potentially fatal fever.

January 10, 2013

End of the World? Nah. End of the World as We Know It. Yah.

So the actual end of the world probably shouldn’t worry us overmuch just yet. But the end of the world as we know it probably should.

December 19, 2012

Society

Taking the ‘Burbs: Square Yard Gardening

Ellen LaConte, author of Life Rules: Nature’s Blueprint for Surviving Economic and Environmental Collapse,will be posting a series of essays on her blog that explore the small but cumulative steps we might take toward the conversion of 20th century suburbs into sustainable communities in which post-collapse humans might survive and thrive. Today’s post is the first in this series.

December 17, 2012

Society

It’ll all turn out in the end. Or will it?

The obvious and important difference between this potential Sixth Great Extinction and all the others is that they had natural, unavoidable causes. There are fewer and fewer deniers now that our fossil-fueled grow-consume-lay waste-deplete global economy is the cause of this one.

December 12, 2012

Becoming Legion: Are the Occupations a brief preoccupation or the sign of a world-altering transformation?

We may be witnessing the next stage in the evolution of revolutions, one that could bring Life-honoring, Lifelike democratic powers, freedoms and relationships to peoples around the world. Described by its uppercrustian decriers as 2nd gen hippy activism, Occupy has given them the lie…The present system’s trespasses, shortcomings, ineptitudes and injustices have catalyzed a 21st century melting pot moment, almost a Bastille-storming sort of moment. Never in American history has such a diversity of Americans spoken as if in one voice, crying “Foul!”

October 20, 2011

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