Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“Eco Vista” was the name chosen in 2017 by a group of students at the University of California, Santa Barbara acting together with long-time community members to describe their vision of turning their rather unusual community of Isla Vista into an ecovillage in the next ten years. Unusual because 23,000 people live together in an area of just .54 square miles, with eighty percent of them between the ages of 18 and 24.
For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?
These are simple things with only a few steps. The microbial communities are robust and resilient, so they can be neglected for days or weeks and then brought back to life. They yield more than one product we find useful. In short, perfect ferments for beginners.
What better time to step back and consider alternatives, to review those hidden assumptions about success, happiness and work-life balance, and to do some of the deep thinking that philosophy is famously known and occasionally ridiculed[2] for?
In covid-19, neoliberal capitalism has met a formidable foe. The pandemic has shown just how fragile and dysfunctional the market/state order — as a production apparatus, ideology, and culture — truly is. C
In our work to build the Agrarian Commons, Agrarian Trust participates in this work: to confront systems and structures that have resulted in inequitable access to land, and thus impeded the most vulnerable and historically disadvantaged among us from having true control over their food supply.
The etymology of “apocalypse” points to an “unveiling”, dropping illusion and finding revelation. As our global production systems and social institutions (eg. healthcare, education) are suddenly overwhelmed, their basic unsuitability is exposed.
The coronavirus crisis is prompting us to improvise new ways of collaborating and coordinating. Data-driven Awareness-Based Collective action (D-ABC) operates by attending to a situation together, and then adjusting one’s behavior accordingly.
As the coronavirus pandemic affects every area of the food supply chain, the ORFC team find out how Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), box schemes and others working with shorter supply chains are responding to the sudden huge demand for their supplies.
One can only hope that this wave of newbie gardeners carries on regardless, once we emerge from this crisis, blinking into the brave new greener world ahead of us.
We make decisions, not on known outcomes but on imagined projections standing on theories of how things work. These projections have an ethical range called the ‘planning horizon.’ The better we understand the world the broader the reach of our anticipations. Conscience serves to measure how well we encompass social effects.
So I have decided to do something counterintuitive, and write a blog that I really hope you won’t read, because its intention is that that you might instead use the time you would have spent reading it to close your laptop screen and go and do something else instead.
