Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
If we create and recreate the world everyday, then how has it become so supposedly absurd to believe we might actually create a world that is honestly making the possibilities of egalitarianism, justice and democracy?
For general audiences and experts alike, this is an engaging, accessible reader that takes an affirmative social change approach to localization.
It’s no accident that the 1960 film adaptation of The Time Machine opens with host HG Wells welcoming four friends to a dinner party in London on January 5, 1900 to recount events that had occurred since he last met them, on New Year’s Eve, 1899.
On assignment for Shareable in Detroit, I’ve been looking for some hope to report on beyond the devastation porn the mainstream media seems fixated on. I’d only been there one day and found plenty of it – driven by determined, creative and resilient folks.
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.
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).
“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).
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).
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.
Even before Sandy, the word ‘resilience’ was on its way to becoming a meme. Then, when a “natural disaster” struck the political and financial powers of New York City – along with countless others – the idea started to take on some urgency.
I was recently re-reading Mary Pipher’s excellent book from a decade ago The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community. The book is in large part stories of refugees and a guide to helping them navigate their new world – encouraging members of the community to act as “cultural brokers” and guides to the newest and most vulnerable Americans…As I was re-reading it, I also noted her list of the attributes for successful endurance and adaptation to a new culture – a list that seems both applicable to those (some of us) who might have to leave their native place and become refugees literally or metaphorically (whether we leave our country or our neighborhood, climate change is likely to drive many of us from our current homes.) It also applies to those of us who may find ourselves living in place – but in a world that is radically different and new to us, and at times frightening.
In this epic length episode #55 of The Extraenvironmentalist we cover the Montreal Degrowth Conference from May 2013. We hear from a number of degrowth academics and activists about the ideas in the movement.
