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Vicki Robin

Vicki Robin is a prolific social innovator, writer and speaker. She is coauthor with Joe Dominguez of the international best-seller, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Viking Penguin, 1992, 1998, 2008). It was an instant NY Times best seller in 1992 and steadily appeared on the Business Week Best Seller list from 1992-1997. It is available now in eleven languages.

Her new book, Blessing the Hands that Feed Us; what eating closer to home can teach us about food, community and our place on earth (Viking/Penguin 2014) tells how her experiment in 10-mile eating not only changed how she ate, but also renewed her hope and rooted her in her community. She calls this “relational eating.” She went on to investigate how we might restore the vitality of our regional food systems so everyone could have the benefit of relational eating – healthy food, healthy communities. She calls this building “complementary food systems,” not to replace but to work along side of the global industrial systems we now depend on for almost 100% of our food. Her book offers many practical tools for transformation, from changing our attitudes, to changing our habits to changing our food sources to getting active in social and political change.

Called by the New York Times as the “prophet of consumption downsizers,” Vicki has lectured widely and appeared on hundreds of radio and television shows, including “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Good Morning America” and National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition” and “Morning Edition”; she has also been featured in well over 100 magazines including People Magazine, AARP, The Wall Street Journal, Woman’s Day, Newsweek, Utne Magazine and the New York Times.
 

Luther Bible

Repent – Another World is Possible

By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog

To repent is to feel such direct sorrow at what you have caused that you turn your life around. You are not passingly sorry. You are sorry for the rest of your days, and come to cherish this sorrow as it reminds you to care about the lives you touch. You may stumble, but you correct course as soon as you are a half a degree off.

  • January 2, 2020
bushfires

Curing, Healing or Letting the Climate Disease Run its Course

By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog

As the climate crisis rises in public awareness,  people have trouble understanding what to do – especially when the “climate doctors” fight among themselves about treatment. Using the disease model we can sort the interventions in 3 categories: curing, healing or denial/ letting the disease run its course.

  • November 26, 2019
Common Crane

Liberating Limits: OBG

By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog

This post from almost exactly 10 years ago is like a “report from the front” of my own thinking related to the question: How can Americans fall in love with limits the way we’ve fallen in love with freedom?” Our romance with freedom as entitlement, expansion, breaking (up, in, out), and, when you come right down to it, selfishness writ so large it’s sociopathy, is literally killing the web of life and the cohesion of societies.

  • November 21, 2019
resilient communities

Gathering in Groups as Society Falls Apart

By Vicki Robin, Jem Bendell blog

“Everyone wants community. Unfortunately, it involves other people.” I used that line in lectures on frugal living when talking of the loneliness of consumerism and the benefits of sharing resources. We idealize the good old days of people helping people out. But can we live them, given who we have become?

  • November 14, 2019
Rubber bands

Reflections while doing dishes

By Vicki Robin, Resilience.org

let's fight for what's right not because we will win (and we'll want to) but because it's just what we do. Let us let this be okay. I am not hopeless. I am only without the hopes I had.

  • July 23, 2019
Desert greening

Moving from Resistance to Repair

By Vicki Robin, The Great Transition Initiative

The climate movement has excelled at resistance but is missing a crucial, essential element: a focus on repair. It is clear about what it is against, but largely mum on a restoration project equal to the scale of climate change damage.

  • July 18, 2019
Community

Making Sense of this Life I’ve Lived

By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog

That title was a tease. I have not made nor will I ever make full sense of me, but I want to connect the dots of my disparate – sometimes desperate – projects over many years and reveal the wholeness and practicality that links them all.

  • June 13, 2019
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