Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Whatever we are facing now we need to have a root system embedded in weather patterns, the presences of animals, our dreams, and the ones who came before us. Myth is insistent that when there is a crisis, genius lives on the margins not the centre.
Advertising Shits In Your Head (no author is given), is a pocket-sized book, but it’ll burn a hole in any pocket you put it in. It’s a powerful tirade against advertising and what it does to our minds, to our culture, to our planet.
Likewise, it looks to me like Standing Rock has devolved into an attempt on the part of big business to exterminate a particular kind of consciousness, demoralize it, demonstrate its weakness, and win recruits to a less feeling way of existing in the service of these business entities and the governmental agencies they have co-opted.
Although food spoils much faster in a tropical climate, the Vietnamese will often store it without refrigeration, and instead take advantage of controlled decay. Vietnam’s decentralised food system has low energy inputs and reduced food waste, giving us a glimpse of what an alternative food system might look like.
True, economic growth does provide some short-term benefits and gains, and recessions are legitimately painful and destructive. But economic growth is nevertheless the greatest threat to humanity today, and those most devoted to economic growth will, as its consistent performance begins to wane in the future, perhaps be the greatest political threat to ordinary people of the world.
Nor is there any need for politics to be something inflicted on us, at great cost to our souls, by tyrannical, abstract systems. Instead it should and could be something we recapture from its lofty conceptual realms, disarm, bring down to earth, and revive — in the process remaking ourselves and our world.
As a developed set of social practices, techniques and ethical norms, permaculture has a lot to say to the world of the commons. This is immediately clear from reading the twelve design principles of permaculture that David Holmgren enumerated in his 2002 book Permaculture: Principles and Practices Beyond Sustainability.
But while I certainly agree that it’s (long past) time to talk about what comes next, and that there’s a very widespread need for something entirely different, it doesn’t really follow – and I’m far from sure – that what we most need is a “next system”. Why so?
Modern economies appear to run less on character, more on energy, resources, investment, debt, and innovation. But in the world that’s coming, who we are may once again matter more than what we have.
If there is one idea that has gained the status of true hegemony – dominant and unquestioned around the world – it is the idea that we need to perpetually grow our economies, and every part of them, in order to improve the quality of human life.
The American way of life is saturated with oil. …Now we’ll examine how to lower the oil that directly and indirectly permeates the other parts of our lives.
A more accurate reckoning of the economic benefits of pipelines needs to consider the negative impact of pipelines on other parts of our economy.
