Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Among those who focus on sharing and the commons, an urban village is a term that refers to a collaborative way of life — a relatively small, place-based urban community where people cooperate to meet one another’s many needs, be they residential, economic, governmental, or social. In the process, they wind up transforming their own experience of that community.
Our guest this week on Sea Change Radio, Low Tech Magazine founder, Kris De Decker, makes a compelling case for the abandonment of efficiency as the barometer for planetary stewardship. He proposes we use the simpler, but perhaps more painful objective of sufficiency.
A Europe-wide movement is an opportunity to pool resources and learn from each other. Reaching across national and disciplinary borders is a way to reach a critical mass in terms of size, attracting the attention of regional, national and international policymakers to ensure socially and environmentally ambitious reform.
I have not yet seen a better more worked out pathway to creating systemic change as the Transition model and practice. There are many things wrong with Transition, or solutions not yet created. There will be more on that in my next, and last post for Transition Network.
The Incredible edible Todmorden movement has turned all the public spaces, from the front yard of a police station to railway stations, into farms filled with edible herbs and vegetables. Locals and tourists pluck fruits and vegetables for free.
There is a lot for us to do, and unless we have public space — unless we push back against all the ways that politicians at all levels try to privatize, monetize or securitize space — we can’t do the work of building a different kind of society and a different kind of world.
With permaculture design we can create productive spaces, without much input once established. Will you design a resilient productive garden?
This is a series called Dark Kitchen: a set of pieces that will look at and question the culture of food in times of fall. This is a story about food and powerdown. It could seem like a personal story except that it is not: it is a social story about how everything changes when you break the illusions your civilisation is wrapped in.
At a time of extraordinary wealth inequality, taxing wealth to pay for higher education is a powerful idea. If the California initiative passes in November, it will serve as a model to the nation for how to both reduce concentrated wealth and expand college opportunity.
Last month, the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld Portland’s ban as constitutional, affirming the city’s power to regulate the safety and welfare of its residents and sending a powerful signal to cities that they too can take the lead to limit fossil fuel use.
Starting in the late 1990s, Time started to pass nutritionism by. The modern food movement crystallized around 2007, when the Oxford dictionary declared “locavore” word of the year. After that, “healthfood nut” and “gourmet” were no longer the only words used to describe people who took food seriously.
How many people in North America and Europe have known for at least 15 years that climate change is dangerous, that it is caused mostly by our burning of fossil fuels, and that we must drastically reduce our fossil fuel consumption? That would be most of us.
