Review: “The Local Food Revolution: How Humanity Will Feed Itself In Uncertain Times”
By Carolyn Baker, carolynbaker.net
Author Michael Brownlee is inciting a local food revolution, and this revolution is far more expansive, far more radical, and far more life-altering than creating a few farmers markets and promoting one’s local economy. According to Brownlee, our industrial food system “has itself become the greatest threat to humanity’s being able to feed itself.”
The Wild Edge Of Sorrow: A Book Review By Carolyn Baker
By Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
Why should we consent to an apprenticeship with sorrow and read this instruction manual for doing so? From my perspective, the answer is quite simple: Unacknowledged and unexpressed grief is the most oppressive and agonizing burden that humans are carrying at this moment in history.
Community Grounded In Grief In The Age Of Limits
By Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
Grief reveals the undeniable reality of our bond with the world…It is grief that moves us in the direction of contact, towards the helping hands and embrace of others…without it we would not know the heartening quality of compassion, could not experience the full breadth of love, the surprise of joy, nor celebrate the sheer beauty of the world.
The Five Stages Of Collapse, By Dmitry Orlov – Book Review
By Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
Many of us who have been researching collapse for a decade or more repeatedly use the word in writing, speaking, and daily conversation, but few of us have the opportunity to define it with such precision or personal experience as one finds in Dmitry Orlov’s forthcoming book 'Five Stages of Collapse: A Survivor’s Toolkit'.
The Soul of Community
By Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other. ~Wendell Berry~
The sanctity of food: Conscious eating as a spiritual practice
By Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
Throughout human history, particularly in indigenous cultures, food has been perceived as sacred. The word sacred is not a religious term but rather one that simply means “set apart” or not of the ordinary. It is also related to sacrifice which may mean that something is sacred because it derived from something sacrificed. For example, we speak of battlefields and military cemeteries as sacred. In ancient times, some temples, mountains, or forests were sacred because animals were sacrificed to a god in those places. All food is sacred in the sense that the life of a plant or animal has been sacrificed to feed another being.
Mutually assured well being: The continuity of community and individual resilience
By Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
In the face of incessant climate-change related natural disasters, severe economic contraction, energy depletion, escalating violence, resource wars, and a burgeoning loss of civil liberties, many communities throughout the world are responding resiliently to the unprecedented challenges of our time in ways we could not have imagined even two or three decades ago. Relocalization movements, community land trusts, gift economies, cooperatives, tool libraries, community clothing swaps, and seed-lending libraries are but a few examples of building community resilience among people who have come to understand that the global economy and the consumerism that sustains it are rapidly descending into the dustbin of history.
Book Review: Not The Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, and the Myth of Progress
By Carolyn Baker, Speaking Truth to Power
If you visit John Michael Greer’s Amazon Page you are likely to be incredulous when you discover how many books he has written, and you’ll soon discover that collecting all of his articles online is nearly an impossible task. A voracious reader, a prolific writer, a brilliant thinker whose work is intermittently sprinkled with delightful humor, Greer has become one of the most prominent and credible voices among those articulating the collapse of industrial civilization.