Earth is not a global village: Start living more locally before it’s too late
By Ellen LaConte, Green Living Magazine staff, Life Rules
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.
Global Warning
By Ellen LaConte, Life Rules
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.
End of the World? Nah. End of the World as We Know It. Yah.
By Ellen LaConte, Resilience.org
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.
Taking the ‘Burbs: Square Yard Gardening
By Ellen LaConte, New Society Publishers
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.
It’ll all turn out in the end. Or will it?
By Ellen LaConte, New Society Publishers
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.
Becoming Legion: Are the Occupations a brief preoccupation or the sign of a world-altering transformation?
By Ellen LaConte, Energy Bulletin
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!”
Dear Stephen King: an open letter to one American who really could scare the rest of us into action
By Ellen LaConte, Energy Bulletin
Given your influence and the speed with which you can turn out a blockbuster, Mr. King, you might take my feeble attempt to point out the error of our ways, turn the truth of it into fiction and a few million Americans into Committees of Correspondence, planners of a new Declaration of Independence, this time from the global economy and the Powers that run it and get the lion’s share of the benefit out of it.
Garden as if your life depended on it, because it will
By Ellen LaConte, Energy Bulletin
Tremors in food supply chains and pricing will make gardening look like a lot more than a hobby, a seasonal workout, a practical way to fill your pantry with your summer favorites, or a physically, spiritually and mentally healing activity, or all four. Gardening and small-scale and collective farming, especially of staple crops and the ones that could stave off malnutrition, could become as important as bringing home the bacon, both the piggy and the dollar kind.