Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Three sites were selected for continued field research into growing industrial hemp in North Carolina for 2019. Set in the rolling hills of Anson County, near Charlotte, hemp is a potential boon to a place where commodity crops and forestry are four of the top five industries. Certified hemp seed was drilled onto plots of seven acres, four acres, and nine acres, at a rate of 100 pounds per acre.
Although Biden lost Iowa, he won the endorsement of the 775,000-member International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) while on his way to New Hampshire. It was an unusually early endorsement for the union. In 2008 and 2016, the IBEW waited until Obama and Clinton had more or less secured the nomination. It seems Biden’s poor Iowa showing was as unnerving for the union as it was for Biden.
Some habits make us unhappy. Others reveal unhappiness. Some do both. A healthy society strives to nurture the well-being of its members, because secure, stable people who find satisfaction in life can work together, innovate, adapt to change, and problem-solve effectively. A country full of miserable, angry people who spend their time blotting out their pain or lashing out at others can cope with almost nothing.
Someone should send a note to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) that maybe it’s not all going to work out. If Hess is right about a peak in U.S. shale oil production soon, that peak will come about a decade earlier than the peak forecast by the EIA.
“Jail me for being a loving grandma who cares about her yintah,” says Brenda Michell.
Yintah is the Wet’suwet’en word for land. Michell issues her challenge from the Unist’ot’en Healing Centre, where she is a teacher. The centre is last in a string of outposts on Wet’suwet’en land the RCMP are expected to clear, today or in coming days.
It’s time to swim perpendicular to the tide, time to become a real citizen, and time to practice democracy like my life depends on it, because it does. And start off in this new direction through a one year life experiment I’m calling The Year of Living Locally, which I’ll blog here on Shareable.net.
People also flee from war, civil unrest and personal trauma, and they will increasingly run from natural and unnatural disasters, increasingly caused by climate change: unbearable heat, drought, flooding and crop failures. People also move for education and to join family members who have gone before them. The likelihood that they will be well received depends on how well they can fit in to the places where they land, and whether they are perceived to be adding to or taking from the existing community.
In the USA, 98 percent of all garments are now imported, compared with just five percent in 1965. Fibershed is a welcome plea for a movement to relocalize textile production, similar to that which has revived demand for local foods over the last 20 years.
But as I sit in the dirt, smelling the thyme and tomatoes and basil, hearing the bumble bees in the oregano flowers, I am humbled and grateful to be a witness to the power of life.
As other North American tribes have begun to experience the effects of climate change over the past decade, they too have started to adopt climate resilience and adaptation plans. According to a database maintained by the University of Oregon, at least 50 tribes across the U.S. have assessed climate risks and developed plans to tackle them.
What we know is that across a great range of times and places, people have taken practices of initiation seriously. They have constructed and relied on rituals, tied to moments of transition, in which the participants are taken out of their everyday reality for a time and brought to a confrontation with limits, to the rough edges of knowledge and perception, to the lived experience of their own mortality.
Few books have had the scale of impact on me as this one. It took me 5 days to read and revealed a world that was completely unexpected and quite new. Zuboff is aware that what she writes is about something novel and unprecedented. It is unlike what has gone before. That is what makes us vulnerable.
