Act: Inspiration

Power grows from Motor City soil

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On Dec. 10, 2012, hundreds of Detroiters lined up outside of The East Lake Baptist Church, braving the cold for the last of a series of public hearings on “the Hantz Woodlands deal.” At stake was the “largest speculative land sale in the city’s history”: 140 acres comprised of 1,500 lots of city land. Local multi-millionaire John Hantz wanted to turn this plot into a large timber farm that would be, as he promised, “Detroit’s saving grace.” But the hundreds of residents waiting outside had another idea of what saving the land could mean: They wanted the city to sell individual vacant plots at affordable prices for people to plant community gardens.

Re-enchanting Economics

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Economics as we know it today is broken.  Unable to explain, to predict or to protect, it is need of root-and-branch replacement.  Or, to borrow from Alan Greenspan, it is fundamentally ‘flawed’.  But where do we look for inspiration in facilitating what is the mother of all paradigm shifts?  Interestingly enough, the most insightful and strikingly innovative ideas seem to be coming from all directions other than the economics profession.

Cambridge considerations

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A recent academic study in Cambridge looked to see whether learnings from the success of Silicon-Fen (which lead to companies such as ARM and Autonomy) could be transferred to create Eco-Fen, making Cambridge a sustainable city through new technologies and practices that could be transferable elsewhere.

Some Winter Dispatches from East Anglia in Transition

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It’s early January and I’m sitting in the Green Dragon pub at Sustainable Bungay’s first event of the year, a Green Drinks session on the theme of Well-Being and the Community. The room is packed, the discussion is lively, and a new Arts, Culture and Well-Being group is formed with monthly events already being planned and put into diaries. Everything from mapping the areas in town where people experience well-being (or not), to teaching each other skills in communications, living together, growing food, meditation and even body drumming (I’m going to have a go at that one).

Peak Moment 225: Preparing Emotionally for the Coming Chaos

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“The external growth of a budding economy is over. The focus on growth now needs to be on the inner world.” Carolyn Baker’s Navigating the Coming Chaos is a toolkit to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the collapse of industrial civilization now underway. First build an “internal bunker,” she suggests, to begin healing the fear, grief and despair that immobilize many people in our “culture of numbness.” From that foundation, she invites us to look at who our allies are — people, places, possessions. Carolyn observes that many people experience a level of joy by doing this work (Episode 225).

Transition, Permaculture and Peoplecare: an interview with Looby Macnamara

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Looby Macnamara is a permaculture teacher and author of ‘People and Permaculture: caring and designing for ourselves, each other, and the planet‘. According to the publishers, it is “the first book to explore how to use permaculture design and principles for people – to restore personal, social and planetary well-being. People & Permaculture widens the definition of permaculture from being mainly about land-based systems to taking it right into the heart of our own lives, relationships and society”. I caught up with Looby via. Skype, and started by asking her how she came to the work that led to her writing the book (you can either listen to this podcast, or the transcript is below).

Local economic resilience

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One the key insights of Transition is that our local communities are vulnerable to the shocks that will certainly come from extreme weather, volatile energy prices and supply disruption, and global financial meltdown. A full and proper analysis of this vulnerability, in general and in the case of Totnes, is a far bigger project than will fit into a blog post. However, we can easily zero in on a big part of it, which is our dependence on the global economic system itself.