Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
First of all, wood stoves are not an automatic environmental impact win. You should know that right up front (more about it later). We always consider environmental impact when we choose but we also take into account other things: comfort, safety, labor commitment and especially resilience. Our wood stove was chosen mainly for resilience.
As we all know, shifting away from the dominant culture of consumption can be overwhelming. Our brains are wired to stick to habits with which we’re familiar. Our friends and family have expectations of us being a certain way. But it’s clear that we need to make big changes.
We live with the belief that we have created an economic system called capitalism and that we have control over it though government policy and taxes. What if the tables were turned and capitalism only describes a self organizing system that creates itself in an environment of surplus goods and services?
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.
But there is another way to live, which involves re-localizing goods and services. Please bear in mind we will have to do this either way. We can quit oil on our own now in a graceful way that our children will be proud of, or we can keep going and be forced to quit when we are not ready. Now is the time to start working together to be free from this addiction.
Well-done, compact cities and towns are incredibly livable and pleasurable, as well as more financially sustainable. Humans are very adaptable and resilient, and the transition to whatever is next should also give us more excitement than sorrow or remorse.
The America of the 50s and 60s is over. The party has long since petered out. That’s a good thing. Let’s clean up and move on to something better.
After a couple of years as growers, Jaeger and Ajamian realized that they couldn’t build a local food system without a local processing facility, and they opened Shagbark in a former carpet warehouse in 2010. Now, they say that with each passing year at Shagbark, they find more and more reasons why local and regional processing facilities for staple foods are important.
Fibersheds put it all together into a practical, natural, and hopeful whole. It’s based in the philosophy that nature still knows best, whether it involves the role of animals on the land, promoting life in the soil, keeping the ground covered with plants, building up soil carbon, generating local jobs, and using ingredients sourced from nature.
The revelation Monday that a blowout last year at an Ohio natural gas well owned by an ExxonMobil subsidiary was one of the country’s largest-ever leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane provoked impassioned calls for a rapid, just transition to 100% renewable energy nationwide.
While defeating the right at the ballot box remains vital, our long-term work involves keeping alternatives to the present alive in society’s imagination. In the face of an unthinking insistence that neoliberal inequality and bigotry are unavoidable, we need to become difficult dissidents and uncooperative naysayers who speak up.
Members of Earthseed describe themselves as a group of “black and brown parents, activists, artists, educators, business owners, farmers, and researchers, who came together to remember our relationships to land, to livelihood and to each other,” and to cultivate a “transformational response to oppression and collective heartbreak: A model of community resilience through cooperative ownership of land and resources.”
Unless the world begins to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement “will slip out of reach,” according to the latest UN Environment Programme (UNEP) emissions gap report.
