Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Wider issues like climate change, energy scarcities, economic stagnation and political fragmentation are already reconfiguring our world, but we can only guess at the local adjustments this will demand of us – which makes it hard to know where to put our energies and what kinds of institutions to support and nurture.
We must look at how we can push forwards to strengthen our local food system, increasing resilience and ensuring sustainability while continuing to support those struggling, fighting for food justice, and prioritise our local farmers and producers.
It was great to have 146 Transitioners, from 84 different groups, come along to the workshops. But what brought them here? What was their passion and when did they begin their Transition journey? All of this fed into the beginning of our conversations about connecting regionally.
While Transition and other grassroots groups focus on the vital task of local resiliency, it is becoming clear to many of us that the demands of our time, and the transition now unfolding, also require us to think regionally.
Richard Heinberg presenting at Universidad Metropolitana (UMET) Puerto Rico.
The return to an older American concept of government as the guarantor of the national commons, the theme of last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report, is to my mind one of the crucial steps that might just succeed in making a viable future for the post-imperial United States. A viable future, mind you, does not mean one in which any signficant number of Americans retain any significant fraction of the material abundance we currently get from the “wealth pump” of our global empire. The delusion that we can still live like citizens of an imperial power when the empire has gone away will be enormously popular, not least among those who currently insist they want nothing to do with the imperial system that guarantees their prosperity, but it’s still a delusion.
