By Sophia Parker, Medium.com
During those nine months we changed our name from ‘Tooting Baby Bank’ to Little Village. This was a very important change. It underlined the fact that as well as redistibuting pre-loved kit to families in need, we also had some serious intentions to build community.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
By Tracy L. Barnett, Earth Island Journal
By Anne B. Ryan, Feasta
I read The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a grown-up economy (Katherine Trebeck and Jeremy Williams, Polity, 2019) during summer 2019 and have been dipping back into it ever since. To somebody who asked me what it’s about, I replied, ‘It’s Enough Is Plenty for the current decade; it’s all about how rich countries can share the wealth so that everybody can have enough, and how poorer countries can take varied trajectories that do not result in the maldevelopment we see in many rich countries today’.
By Julie Dermansky, DeSmog Blog
A plume from the Texas Petroleum Chemical (TPC) plant hung over Port Neches, Texas on Thanksgiving as emergency workers continued to fight the fire following explosions at the plant on November 27. A mandatory evacuation that called for 60,000 people within a four-mile radius from the plant to leave their homes the day before the holiday was lifted yesterday.
By Kara Stiff, Low-Carbon Life
This year, my summer favorites like tomatoes, bell peppers, winter squash and cucumbers failed badly. This begs the question: What survives a drought? What thrives when the pasture grasses are baking and the thermometer sits at a hundred day after day?
By Denise Fort, Island Press
New Mexico and other states that depend on fossil fuels need to wake up from the somnolence that oil wealth is bringing. The boom-and-bust cycle will continue, at least partly because the world is finally transitioning to renewable energy, though the more familiar fluctuation of global markets is also a factor.
By Julia Schöneberg, Open Democracy
A fundamental questioning of the whole ‘development’ idea as such is uncomfortable and inconvenient. Yet, especially in light of the fact that the finiteness of our planet becomes more and more difficult to overlook, it is time to not only look for, but to practice alternatives to development.
By Brian Miller, South Roane Agrarian
There once was a farm that became an airport. So reads the first line of our modern fairytale, our religion for the age. It is also the promotional tagline chosen by the boosters of Pittsburgh’s airport, where a pair of signs sporting the slogan hang throughout.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
Natural systems are most resilient when they showcase a lot of diversity — something our economic monocultures ignore. A wild forest can absorb many surprises from fires to insects, for example, because its diverse ecosystem ensures robustness over centuries and allows for collapse and renewal.
By Suki Ferguson, Red Pepper
This Is Not A Drill has been written to clarify, inform, inspire and equip the people who are undecided yet interested in moving deeper into the climate action zeitgeist XR has ingeniously catalysed.
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
We humans are aggregating more power, and doing so more unequally across society, than in any previous period in history. Power is good; without it, we would be powerless. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing, and that’s an apt way of describing the human predicament in the early 21st century.
By Kara Stiff, Low-Carbon Life
Like with every piece of our homestead, I can look forward to the benefits of the next project and still revel in the luxury of the imperfect first try. At least, I can next April, when I’m showering back in the garden.
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
Last week a new paper in Nature caused a stir and world-wide headlines, and for good reason. “Climate tipping points - too risky to bet against” by Lenton, Rockstrom, Gaffney, Rahmstrof, Richardson, Steffen and Schellnhuber look at the “evidence on the threat of exceeding (climate system) tipping points, and whether we still have any control over them” because this “helps to define that we are in a climate emergency.”
By Esha Chhabra, Jess Daniels, Fibershed
Looking across the landscape, we see at least six key approaches to increasing soil carbon and so much more: integrating animals, rotating crops, building biodiversity with plantings like hedgerows, conserving soil with cover cropping, boosting soil fertility with fungal-dominated compost, and eventually finding methods for no-till cotton that do not depend on synthetic chemistry.
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
It’s not as hard as you might think. If you have the right action for a couple of seasons — the Earth actually wants to be full of life. That’s it’s nature. We actually have to work to get it to not do that. So if we just get behind her and breathe life into what she’s already doing, it can change pretty fast. But we need the tools and we need the skills and we need the knowledge and most of all the wisdom that supports all of these things.
By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog
Repeating and evolving. We are learning together. You are welcome in. Your voice is needed. Your transformation of shock and grief into response and relief is needed. We’re all in this together. Humanity finally has a common challenge.
Chelsea Green
There is a major disconnect between what we wear and our knowledge of its impact on land, air, water, labor, and human health. Even those who value access to safe, local, nutritious food have largely overlooked the production of fiber, dyes, and the chemistry that forms the backbone of modern textile production. While humans are 100 percent reliant on their second skin, it’s common to think little about the biological and human cultural context from which our clothing derives.
By Rob Hopkins, Chelsea Green
The founder of the international Transition Towns movement asks why true creative, positive thinking is in decline, asserts that it’s more important now than ever, and suggests ways our communities can revive and reclaim it.
By Craig Collins, CounterPunch
Movement organizers must help people anticipate, adapt to, and survive these hardships—but social movements cannot stop there. They must help people mount the kind of political resistance that can strip the fossil fuel industry of its power and leverage their own growing influence to demand that society’s remaining resources be re-directed toward a Green transition.
By Erik Ohlsen, Resilience.org
Now we were planting the seeds of a different kind of trade. A different kind of economy. One built on the mutual trust of nature and human. An interdependent relationship woven with seeds and soil, water and sweat. One founded on the ecological processes of life, not the profit margins of an economic system of death. We built gardens and we healed the land that week. We sang and linked arms and we shut down empire together. We cried, we planted, and we stood our ground for a thriving world; and the seeds of change took root.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said that "the only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." Unfortunately, when some economists turn their sights on the economics of climate change, their unreliable methods imperil not just the economic life of humankind but its very existence.
By Giorgos Kallis, Degrowth.de
In my book I show how such romantic (and related socialist, feminist and anarchist) ideas articulate a notion of limits as a source of freedom and abundance. Likewise, those of us who defend degrowth today do not call for limits because the world is running out of stuff. We are not worried that growth might come to an end – we want to end growth and stop its catastrophic and meaningless path, despoiling the abundance of this planet that we can enjoy in common.
By Marula Tsagkari, Resilience.org
So, why should we give up all this and leave in a world full of boring, grimy and sad clothes (even if it is a degrowth world). On the contrary, what I envision is a degrowth world based on simple aesthetics wehre people find a way of expression and creativity through their clothes and they are not judged for it.
By Robert Raymond, David Bollier, Shareable
In a modern era marked by private property and fierce competition, the idyllic commons can feel like something from our deep past that is now lost — but it would be a mistake to think this way. The commons are actually all around us. They take many forms and offer a promise for a future that brings us closer to a world of equity and ecological regeneration.
