A Visit to Titusville: Building Resilient Communities
By Bill Sharp, Transition Network
For over a year now, Transition Centre has been seeking to address what it sees as an emerging challenge: Are we running out of time to achieve a sustainable future?
Greening Uganda: Restoring Native Forest Cover To Increase Local Resilience
By Joanna Trewern, Food Tank
The Native Seeds project is creating sustainable jobs in the settlement, and distributes three types of tree seedlings to refugee households, schools, and health clinics: moringa seedlings, various fruit tree seedlings (jackfruit, avocado, papaya, orange, lemon, guava, and mango), and twelve fast-growing timber species that can be sustainably harvested for firewood.
Foreign Aid for Microgrids
By Chris Nelder, Energy Transition Show
If you wanted to build a standalone microgrid in Africa, powered by local renewable resources, and make it reliable enough to run a neonatal intensive care clinic, how would you do it?
How a Local Bookstore Can Make your Town Richer — in More than One Way
By Kea Wilson, Strong Towns
But what cities would be wise to do, I think, is to recognize the powerful neighborhood-wide effect of the independent bookstore model, and soften the ground for more small businesses operating, by their nature, on small margins and small bets.
Chester Supertrees – an Inspiration for Transforming our Cities
By Tegan Tallulah, The Climate Lemon
Today I want to tell you about a really cool project which is a fantastic example of what one passionate individual can do if they put their mind to it.
First Nations Pipeline Protest: 14 Land Protectors Arrested as Canadian Police Raid Indigenous Camp
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
In Canada, armed forces raided native Wet’suwet’en territory in British Columbia Monday, with at least 14 arrests being reported. Land defenders faced off with Royal Canadian Mounted Police as the police breached two checkpoints set up to keep pipeline workers out of protected territory.
Old Mother Forest
By Suprabha Seshan, Local Futures
If you want to survive the holocaust of planetary proportions that is upon us all, you must defend the plants, and help them, or you must get out of the way, so they can get on with their planet-healing work.
Eating The Platter Clean
By Simon Fairlie, The Land Magazine
These so-called "default" livestock don't compete for food with humans: they are fed on matter that humans can't or won't eat, mostly grass, leaves and waste materials, which they turn into food for humans.
Community Organising: Back to its Roots
By Stephanie Gamauf, STIR
This article calls for ‘community’ to be led back to its origins and to defend the values that social justice organisers have fought for throughout history.
Supreme Court Issues ‘Crushing Blow’ to Exxon in Major Climate Case, Legal Experts Say
By Kyla Mandel, Climate Progress
The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from ExxonMobil regarding Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s climate change investigation Monday, a decision legal experts called a “crushing blow” to the oil giant.
“Energy Dominance,” What does it Mean? Decoding a Fashionable Slogan
By Ugo Bardi, Cassandra's legacy
During the past few years, it has become fashionable to say that the US has, in fact, become energy independent, even though it is not true. And, doubling down on this concept, there came the idea of "energy dominance," introduced by the Trump administration in June 2017. It is now used at all levels in the press and in the political debate.
Why Should I Sacrifice when Big Companies are to Blame for Climate Change?
By Eve Andrews, Grist
Here’s an easy way to differentiate wants from needs: define what you need as the future you want — and the future you want is a functional civilization. I promise.
James McKay, the Man who Draws the Future.
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
As soon as you have even just a rough sketch of something that’s optimistic, you then have something that people can react to, the visions can be tremendously powerful in terms of motivating people to make some real changes ...
Fully Engaged Farming at Sophie’s Icelandic Sheep
By Sarah Lillegard, Fibershed
There is never a quiet season here. Even with the hoop houses cleared of their summer harvest and the small flock of Icelandic sheep fresh from a fall shearing, the farm is still rich with growth.
Review: The Sun by J. Courtney White
By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press
J. Courtney White's The Sun is at once an entertaining murder mystery and an earnest look at the many crises confronting the American West.
Peak Oil Review: 7 January 2019
By Tom Whipple, Steve Andrews, Peak-Oil.org
Since hitting a recent low on Dec 22nd, oil prices have climbed by $5-6 a barrel as the markets tried to sort out where supply and demand are going.
Slouching Towards Suburbia The In-Between Green Constituency (Part 1)
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
Correlating the poll data with the outcomes of the 2018 midterms leads easily to the conclusion that America’s suburbs will be the battlefields on which the 2020 election will be fought.
Living in the Concretaceous Period
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
While biologists have long agreed that humans are the dominant lifeform of the Anthropocene, some geologists now argue that, during the pivotal Concretaceous phase, it was the automobile that served as the true apex species.
Democracy, truth, fallibilism, and the tech overlords
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Truth is a very difficult thing to come by. Usually, when humans stumble onto it, they don't even know they have. America started out as a nation skeptical of royal prerogatives and concentration of power. We've morphed into a gullible society easily manipulated by dreams of a techno-utopian future.
Insights From The Wilderness – Human Civilization Will Not Survive Climate Intensification
By Dick Rauscher, Resilience.org
The possible future we create together cannot be the future that used to be. We cannot simply re-create the world we are living in today.
Grandmothers Bring Food and Comfort to Asylum-Seekers at Bus Stations
By Lornet Turnbull, YES! magazine
Every morning, Bonita Amaro and her sister Yolanda Sanchez arrive at the Greyhound bus station in Sacramento to greet asylum-seekers passing through on their way to sponsors’ homes across the country.
Think Resilience with Transition Streets!
By Carolyne Stayton, Transition US
Transition US has teamed up with Post Carbon Institute (PCI) to provide easy and free access of our Transition Streets Handbook (a curated guidebook empowering neighbors with proven actions to conserve energy & water, reduce waste & save money) to winter 2019 Think Resilience course participants.
Happiness or Authenticity?
By Brian Davey, Feasta
In place of the banal tautology of 19th century utilitarianism we need a deep study of the relationship between economic activity and mental health because this marketing assault, this religion of consumerism, has many aspects that do not appear to be doing us any good.
The Green New Deal Goes Viral: What’s Next Is Up to Us
By Ted Franklin, System Change not Climate Change
Those of us who are hoping the Green New Deal will lead to profound social change can learn from the class struggle that swirled around the 1930s New Deal.
Re-Regionalization: Bioregional Development as a Regenerative Pathway
By Daniel Christian Wahl, Medium.com
To relocalise effectively we need to map the productive potential of our regions and communities, including resource, material, waste and energy flows and identify threads and opportunities for relocalising production and consumption.
Population Wrapped Up: A Response to Jane O’Sullivan
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
I’d like to have devoted more time to this issue, and perhaps to have reflected further on population issues more generally but with this fairly brief response only to a few of Dr O’Sullivan’s specific points I propose to wrap things up on the population front from the Small Farm Future end.
2018 Was a Year of Deadly Climate Disasters and an ‘Ear Splitting Wake-Up Call’
By Sharon Kelly, DeSmog Blog
Indeed, 2018 brought some of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history — many of them linked to climate change, scientists have said.
The FT Editorial Board Has a Problem with Those who Pretend to Solve Climate Change. Who Might they Have in Mind?
By Jeremy Leggett, Jeremy Leggett blog
“The depressing reality about climate change is that we could solve the problem, at manageable cost, but are failing to do so.” So the Financial Times Editorial Board concluded on 26th December.
A Regenerative Food System is Both a Means and an End
By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
Continued intensification of the food system will lead to increased pressure on nature as well as the continued erosion of food culture.
Beyond the Choke Hold of Growth: Post-Growth or Radical Degrowth?
By Riccardo Mastini, Tim Jackson, Giorgos Kallis, Green European Journal
In part two of Riccardo Mastini’s interview with Giorgos Kallis and Tim Jackson at the Post-Growth 2018 conference at the European Parliament, they trace the history that led to growth being prized above all else and discuss how to conceptualise a future beyond growth.
The Energy Descent Future
By Samuel Alexander, Joshua Floyd, The Ecologist
This leads us to the view – open to change through ongoing learning of which actual experience related to the realisation of post-carbon societies will be central – that humanity’s best course of action is to act in the present as if renewable futures will entail energy descent.
We Are Regenerating An Entire Bioregion
By Joe Brewer, Medium.com
A bioregion is the integrated system of all human activities within a given area with all of the larger ecosystems on which they depend. It has a shared cultural identity expressed through love of place, shared values and worldview, and commonly understood modes of exchange.
Peak Oil Review 2 January 2019
By Tom Whipple, Steve Andrews, Peak-Oil.org
It was a volatile week for oil prices with WTI falling on Monday to nearly $42 a barrel and London falling to $51. Oil surged on Wednesday, after posting on Christmas day its strongest daily gain in more than two years from the steep losses on Monday that pushed crude benchmarks to lows not seen since 2017.
Measuring Sustainability for Fairer Future Policy
By Megan Perry, Oxford Real Farming Conference
At this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference the Sustainable Food Trust will be convening a session delving into one of the most important issues for future farming policy in the UK – how do we measure on-farm sustainability and bring about convergence in the multitude of conflicting and overlapping assessment and certification systems currently being used?
COP24: No Response to the Crisis
By Nadja Charaby, Tadzio Müller, Socialist Project/The Bullet
The climate crisis is looming large and threatens to go beyond our capabilities. In addition, COP24 at Katowice has decided on a rulebook that in parts both lacks in substance and is unjust. The resolutions agreed are not enough to prevent disaster, by a long shot.
The Politics of Post-Growth
By Riccardo Mastini, Tim Jackson, Giorgos Kallis, Green European Journal
In the first part of a two-part interview, Riccardo Mastini discusses the possibilities and challenges for imagining a world beyond growth with two key post-growth thinkers at the conference.
Native Shrubs and Why They’re Essential for Carbon Sequestration
By Adrian Ayres Fisher, Ecological Gardening
Wherever there is a lawn, a tree and possibly a small garden, or even a tiny strip along the foundations of a building, there should be a native shrub or two, or possibly more.
The Religion of American Politics
By Jody Tishmack, Anima/Soul
We each in our way must do what we can, even in the absence of faith, to make our future tenable. We can’t expect others to take care of us. We can’t expect solutions. But we can treat others with respect and dignity…the way we all want to be treated.
The White Christmases of our Forebears
By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry
Generations of Hollywood films have conditioned us to expect snowbound Christmases, even though they are no longer the norm for Missouri (Meet Me in St. Louis), modern London (Love, Actually), or most of the other cities where such movies are set.
Peak Oil Review 26 December 2018
By Tom Whipple, Peak-Oil.org
Oil prices fell by more than 11 percent last week to their lowest since mid-2017 with London futures closing at $53.82 and New York at $45.59.
Christmas during the Forgetting
By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry
No one is saying that all modern creations are bad, of course, and you can like whatever you like. I’m simply saying that the actual customs that our forebears kept for hundreds or thousands of years disappeared quickly and recently during the Great Forgetting of modern times, replaced by less wholesome and healthy customs manufactured by people with agendas.
Light Posting Over the Holidays
By Resilience.org Staff, Resilience.org
We will be taking some time off over the holiday period. Regular posting will resume January 2, 2018.