Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Basic income is a necessary part of any coherent state strategy for fostering private-sector business and entrepreneurship in the future. By providing basic securities for those wishing to start a business, it would create a supporting scaffold on which enterprise, creativity and inventiveness can flourish.
How manufacturers, retailers, restaurants, and others are doing business the cooperative way.
Beginning May 9th, I will be biking across the country, from Maine to Washington, as part of the Transition Challenge and my own journey to “Occupy Carbon.”
There is little disagreement that urban farming translates into increased access to local, sustainable, and healthy food, and that this is a very good thing. But how is it done? What are the success stories of urban farming? And what exactly is a “foodshed?”
Confucius said that the health of a nation could be determined by the integrity of its homes. If we apply that standard, we’re in trouble.
For years people and organizations from Frances Moore Lappé to Slow Food have sought to repair and restore our broken food system, making noticeable but still negligible progress. Surely more people today are aware that there’s a problem, and admitting that is the first step, as they say.
Dreaming, organizing, and awareness raising are all important parts of the work we do, but there is something to be said for bringing people together, getting your hands dirty, and creating something beautiful. As we heard in last month’s teleseminar with Rob Hopkins, practical projects are one of the most fun and effective ways to energize and strengthen your existing Transition groups and reach out to inspire and engage your community.
Gavin Andresen, the lead scientist for the Bitcoin Foundation (and one of its only two staff members) sat down with a few of us at the UMass Amherst Knowledge Commons meeting on Wednesday. Having read so much hype and misinformation about Bitcoin over the past few months, I was excited to have a chance to talk to someone directly connected with this brilliant experiment in algorithmic institution-building. Bitcoin is, of course, the digital currency that has been in the news a lot recently because of its surging value among traders – and its dramatic crash.
•Mother: Caring for 7 Billion – Teaser – Free Streaming of Director’s Cut •Do the Math Documentary Premieres on Earth Night, April 21 •Growing Cities Movie
“Because you gave names to everything you found, and came up with logos for bad ideas, and woke up early for conference calls, and changed your car every two years, and it was no progress at all/just a shadow festival/because of that you will have to learn to look at the sky again, you will have to learn to eat food that grows where you live again, you will have to learn to touch what you make.”
•Sacred Economics: Chapter 17, Summary and Roadmap (Pt.18)
•A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
•The End of Growth, Part 1
•The Limits of the Earth, Part 1: Problems
•Are social enterprises the future for libraries?
Usually when I go to events I tend to be the ‘resilience guy’, or one of a handful of people who work with and think about resilience who tend to gather at the back of other events and bemoan the fact that no-one has talked about resilience yet. So I was fascinated when I saw that the British Red Cross was hosting a one-day conference on resilience, the first that I’ve been aware of.
