Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The pioneering Dutch “Energiesprong” model – Dutch for “energy leap” – involves a major, whole-house retrofit to achieve a near net-zero energy home, typically including the fitting of an external “wall envelope” for insulation, as well as rooftop solar panels.
It was great to have 146 Transitioners, from 84 different groups, come along to the workshops. But what brought them here? What was their passion and when did they begin their Transition journey? All of this fed into the beginning of our conversations about connecting regionally.
In fact there’s a new wave of interest in creating ritual spaces and practices like these that are designed to meet the challenges of the 21st century. They’re not modelled on any particular faith but draw on an eclectic range of religious, magical and secular healing traditions.
I think it’s because the challenges are so great that the need to fundamentally reset the relationship between business, government, and local communities and place them on a more equal footing, transferring not just responsibility but genuine power, is increasingly not a choice but an imperative.
One of the protesters called out to the crowd gathered on Waterloo Bridge, “If you’ve ever wondered what you would have done during the Second World War, this is your answer.” Fighting evil in the 1940s was not a peaceful, niche enterprise. Doing so today must not be either.
The outcome of the indigenous struggle is important to all of us. A Guarani person recently put it this way: ‘If indigenous peoples become extinct and dead, the lives of all are threatened, for we are the guardians of nature. Without forest, without water, without rivers, there is no life, there is no way for any Brazilian to survive.
In producing their book Why Does Patriarchy Persist Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider doggedly pursued the mystery of why our patriarchal ways of living and relating endure with such tenacity when they keep producing results we do not want.
Now I understand that sustainable sovereign economies are needed to replace the system we support with our purchasing power, and our ancient teachings have all of those economies passed down in traditional families.
Whether we manage to find our way through depends primarily on what goes on inside our minds – on whether we’re able to manage our mental and emotional states at a time of extraordinary turbulence; whether we reach for the right stories to explain what’s happening at this moment in history; and above all, whether enough of us can see ourselves as part of a larger ‘Us’ instead of a ‘them-and-us,’ or just an atomised ‘I.’
The question remains unanswered: Do we — including future generations — have a legal right to a climate in which we can pursue our rights to life, liberty, property and happiness?
Doomer porn has limited appeal and shelf life; you can only get so miserable before there’s nowhere to go and no point. One of the most appealing subsets of speculative fiction, then, is what we might call the “good old future,” where our descendants have come through a crisis and created a better world that looks a lot like the past.
What happens when an illegally logged tree falls or poachers kill endangered brown bears in the forest, but there’s no journalist to report it? That’s the situation in the Republic of Georgia, which faces challenges that include poaching, deteriorating air quality, habitat disruption from new hydropower dams, illegal logging and climate change.
