Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ashland has an abundance of “social inventors” — people who see a need in the community and are able to rally others to take part in it, all to make life better, more fun and more hopeful. In a new book called “Better Ways to Live,” Ashlander Craig K. Comstock profiles a raft of social inventions, many which influence the Ashland community…
These days, human-scale straw bales have been largely replaced by mammoth cylinders that require mammoth farm equipment; another way we have used the cheap energy of recent decades to burn our bridges. If you can find some of the old rectangular, metre-long bales, however, they can be put to many uses.
It’s impressively easy to misunderstand the point made in last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report. To say that the world we experience is made up of representations of reality, constructed in our minds by taking the trickle of data we get from the senses and fitting those into patterns that are there already, doesn’t mean that nothing exists outside of our minds.
If there’s a single consistent aspect to Donald Trump’s strategic vision, it’s this: U.S. foreign policy should always be governed by the simple principle of “America First,” with this country’s vital interests placed above those of all others.
If there is one idea that has gained the status of true hegemony – dominant and unquestioned around the world – it is the idea that we need to perpetually grow our economies, and every part of them, in order to improve the quality of human life.
…[A]n unfortunate side-effect of the explosion of information that the Internet has provided us with is the even further erosion of the signal-to-noise ratio.
Of all the problems facing parents, making sure our children have access to the highest quality childcare is one of the biggest. As studio members at Near Now…we have been working with #RadicalChildcare founder Amy Martin to research and prototype possible alternatives to current childcare provision.
These days, you spend your life paying off a house, and even building a shed or animal shelter can be expensive…For thousands of years, though, people used a simpler technique that used nothing but natural, local materials.
Too obsessive a fixation on that claim to authority, and the political and financial baggage that comes with it, could very possibly result in the widespread rejection of science across the industrial world in the decades ahead.
Even though, by definition, public spaces are open and accessible to everyone, for refugees and immigrants they often become sites of danger and exclusion.
From a Transition perspective, a shortening of trade distances has to be a good thing, right? Bringing manufacturing back closer to where people live, thereby reducing carbon emissions, enabling more money to cycle within the national economy rather than globally? So far, so Transition… And yet.
It’s important to say at the outset that this is not about one story being in any simple way better than the other, let alone one being right and the other wrong. The point is that, by being able to contrast the two, we get a fuller understanding of the present moment than either could offer on its own.
