Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A ferment in the environmental movement, brewing for many years, has now bubbled up into the blogosphere. We are dipping our ladle in here to take a little taste of it, even though we are quite certain it is not done fermenting.
What Rapposelli refers to as "real food" is becoming more of an "everyday thing" in Morgan County, according to auction regular Mary VanHorn.
A Sharing Garden differs from the usual community garden in that it is one large plot, shared by all, instead of many separate ones rented by individuals.
In case I don’t use sufficiently ‘skillful means,’ please let me begin with stating: I am not advocating for intentionally creating an economic crash.
It is a rare occurence that I disagree with David Holmgren. But while there is much insight in his most recent paper, Crash on Demand, it also raises many questions and issues that I’d like to explore here. I am troubled by his conclusions, and although I understand the logic behind them, I fear that they could prove a dangerous route to go down if left unchallenged.
The greatest problem we have is that we can’t imagine any alternative. And that is the challenge: to invent, create and think as if we were living just after the collapse, if there is a collapse of capitalism, and how we will organize.
Consider, then, that people lived for thousands of years in wintry lands without a thermostat to crank, or without any modern fuel or technology, and obviously did not all freeze to death – nor were they even necessarily uncomfortable.
Pamela Hess, executive director of the Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture, affectionately refers to the organization’s Mobile Market, a 28-foot rolling farmstand, as a “big crazy hippie bus.”
How can you even think about creating community resilience in a neighbourhood that suffers from poverty, gangs and guns, and which has, at its centre, a huge Chevron refinery which last year exploded, resulting in 15,000 people seeking hospital treatement of breathing difficulties? That’s what Doria does, and she does it with humour, passion, and a fire in her belly.
You probably need to be naked to read this paragraph with a clear conscience.
Our theme for January is ‘Scaling Up’. There is no route map to a powered-down, resilient future. No-one has done this before.
Spurred by the fall of the Paris Commune, Kropotkin believed fervently that social transformation that dealt in ideals alone was destined to fail. A new society, he stressed, must be built on its ability to provide sustenance for all. More than a century later, bread is still the trigger for, and the stuff of, revolution and revolutionary metaphor.
