Out Over Our Skis – Energy Faceplant
The term “out over your skis” means careening forward, a little out of control, very likely headed for a faceplant. This is the position humanity is in when it comes to energy demand.
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Reflections on the Narrative of Transition
So perhaps the narrative of Transition over these 18 years (yes it really has been that long…!) has moved from being about creating catalysts for local resilience to being Time Travel Agencies, who through the work they do, and how they tell stories about what they’ve already done and the potential futures it makes more credible, more within touching distance.
A Small Town’s Comeback: How The Industrial Commons Leveraged Local Assets for Rural Economic Development
The story of The Industrial Commons offers a powerful blueprint for rural communities seeking to reshape their regional economies in a way that honors local culture, relationships, skills, and knowledge.
Peak Population Projections
The recent rapid decline in population growth—even pre-COVID—suggests that a population peak prior to 2050 is not outlandish, provided that current drivers continue to apply. Recent declines in fertility rates, together with a flattening age distribution of young folks, combine to set the stage for population peak and decline.
Now For a Little Climate Perspective
When we speak of saving the climate, it’s really the Holocene climate we are trying to save, and the biological richness holding it up.
Camila Vergara’s Bold Vision for a Plebeian Constitutionalism
Constitutions offer no meaningful political role for ordinary people in democratic governance, and so oligarchic institutions take root that privilege the domination of the few over the many.
Debrief with May Boeve
Organizers looking ahead greatly benefit from pausing for a look back. The value of a good debrief surpasses the time it sacrifices. What can we each understand about the last 15 years that could inform the next — personally, as community and as a movement?
C-wrecked: agrarian transition as politics, Part 2
Making too big a deal about the specific commodity in a given place – such as sheep in upland Wales – risks missing the bigger picture of a general overproduction in the global agricultural and wider economy. But if we really want to name the culprits in these wider economies, pride of place would have to go to fossil fuels, cereal grains and grain legumes.
Messy business: Polluted ‘biosolids’ derail recycling of human waste
Recycling always sounds like a good idea unless what you are recycling has become dangerously toxic.
The world made by hand
In the cellar of my parent’s house sit a series of tools that have served my father and grandfather and great-grandfather, for they were created before the throwaway world was conceived. … They were made for a nation of craftsmen, of people who bore in themselves the power that all humans once had, to reshape wood and hide and stone into a human landscape.
The Steady State Economy Act: Halfway to the Hill?
Promulgating the steady state economy via federal legislation has long been a primary goal at CASSE. However, even a primary goal isn’t necessarily pursued from the get-go.
Nepal’s Self-Managing Forests and the Duck that Dares to Love
As carbon credits try to answer the impossible question of how to value nature, we find ourselves back at the beginning, asking what our forests need to continue to protect us. But nature has always been there, waiting to uncover the answers to our deepest questions.
