Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“If everyone disenchanted with this culture decided to wander off into the lonesome wilderness, it would have absolutely no effect on its workings,” writes Miles Olson, in his book Unlearn-Rewild.
Public art is one of those things that’s more than the sum of its parts. Here in my neighborhood, the humble traffic signal box—a four-foot-tall aluminum cabinet that had never before registered on my radar—seems to be the start of something big.
“Why on earth would we go back in time 70 years to model our current cities on?” Because it worked.
It sounds like multi-tasking run amok. Tackling a slew of problems at once seems like a crazy idea. But when urban water utilities team up with rural neighbors to protect water sources, there’s an outpouring of positive outcomes.
All these questions are questions of agency: to what extent, if any, can humans be purposeful agents of historical change. This question, I will suggest, has up to now been given something like a free pass in much post-carbon discourse, for reasons that I will explain in depth later.
The food cart scene has taken off in Portland in a way it hasn’t in other cities—transforming vacant lots into community spaces and making neighborhoods more pedestrian-friendly and livable.
I just wanted to bake some cookies. And then things got a little crazy.
But how does this push for fracking compare to a different approach, one built around community renewables, community ownership, and energy being seen in a wider context of local economic regeneration and resilience? Let’s see …
In a previous post I argued that economic contraction is necessary and in fact underway. Is this "Collapse" — that scary term that so many authors love to throw around?
As part of our month’s exploration of the theme of ‘scaling up’, I recently visited Ottery St. Mary in East Devon to see Kevin McCabe, his wife Rose, and the extraordinary new cob house he has spent the last 3 years building.
What is coppicing? A lot of people are not familiar with this practice which has been employed for thousands of years in Britain and other temperate regions, so an explanation is in order.
Over the next 2 days we’ll be looking at 2 aspects of earth construction, cob and clay plasters, and their potential for scaling up.
