Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Many people (even if only on a subconscious level) are waiting for technology to rush in like a superhero to vanquish these crises and lead the way to a sustainable future. But technology won’t be our great green savior, at least not without first wrestling with the tough moral dilemmas of our time. In a new manifesto, #NoApp4That, I question the pervasive belief that technology alone will save us.
Wendell Berry’s astute statement that “eating is an agricultural act,” uncontrovertibly connects food back to the land and back to the soil. As he reminds us elsewhere, the soil is where we begin in the most fundamental way: it is “…the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all… Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”
Revitalizing the practice of seed saving is vital for the world’s collective food security. Conservation techniques, such as the creation of seed banks and seed exchanges among farmers, gardeners, and even nations, play an important role in not only preserving ancient, heirloom varieties of important food crops, but also in mitigating against the increasing risks of pests, diseases, and climate change.
In the Vrancea Mountains of Romania, the Eastern Carpathians, people in dozens of villages have used community-based institutions known as obştea to manage forest commons since the sixteenth century.1 The original sense of the word, coming from Slavonic, is “togetherness,” and it underlines the participatory essence of the institution.
One of the reasons we find it hard to face the facts about collapse and climate change is because there are so few imaginary or real life stories about powerdown. There are plenty of success-through-adversity stories, hero stories, princess stories…And somewhere in the bones of ourselves we know this is a key to our future: we don’t know the outcome of the play. Or whether back up will arrive. We go in anyway. Something is pulling us. It’s time.
Blurring the lines between social movement and local governance, these municipalist experiments organize on the basis of existing municipalities or districts, demanding socially just and ecological solutions to issues that concern the community as a whole.
In the UK, only around 10 per cent of new homes are self-built. But with the housing shortage increasingly acute, many groups and local authorities around the country are looking to community self-build as a potential solution. Can it deliver?
A solar revolution is transforming the lives of women in the remotest parts of Asia. They no longer have to wait decades to be connected to a power grid but are able today to exploit the huge potential of the abundant sunshine. In societies where women normally play a subservient role and spend much of their time on menial chores, solar businesses are creating a new breed of female entrepreneur who are bringing electricity to their villages.
I will present what may be the movement’s biggest task: crafting ways and means for it to actually take power across the world so that the desires of the vast majority of the world’s residents (including the non-human creatures among us) can be the benchmark against which we measure our chances for arriving in mid-century in a world characterized not by multiple crises…
Good health means more than good medical care. Many other things affect how long we live and how healthy we feel—conditions in our housing and neighborhoods, the social and physical environment of our communities, economic opportunities and the levels of stress in our lives.
It’s been pointed out countless times that humankind’s current ecological crisis stems from our conviction that we’re apart from nature. Scott Brown’s book Active Peace takes a closer look at what lies beneath this mistaken belief, which he contends has deeply wounded all of us psychologically.
More and more Greeks move away from the cities and start over as farmers. A beekeeper, an olive farmer and a mushroom grower tell us their stories. The seminars offered at the Syngrou Ranch – home of the Athens Institute of Agricultural Sciences – are in high demand, proving that agriculture is trending in Greece.
