Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
To get back to this season’s water crisis, it’s the rich opportunities for reuse and recycling – not the scarcity – that should focus municipal debate about water. Actually, conserving or cutting back on water use is only a drop in the bucket of the water cycle-based strategy that’s needed.
I recently spoke with Gee about his use of an old and largely forgotten term, whether the climate movement can win, and how true democracy exists within movements and the spaces they create.
-Bill McKibben’s Rolling Stone Article Was a Hit — So Why Didn’t It Make a Splash?
-When Journalists Are Dying to Expose Environmental Plunder
-Haiti and the Shock Doctrine
The climate has gone rogue, energy prices are threatening, and the economy sucks. You know the elections aren’t going to make it better. Why wait for government? You can protect your community and yourself by helping your town withstand the shocks.
Late last month, the California State Assembly passed new legislation that would assure legal status for small-scale cottage industries that sell baked goods and other “non-potentially hazardous” food items produced in home kitchens.
There is this idea, not discussed because it is so widely accepted even on the political left, that some sort of independent, free-standing market exists with its own laws, similar to those of natural systems, such as the law of gravity. Democrats want to poke, prod and regulate this market; Republicans say they want to leave it alone. But this so-called free market doesn’t exist, not even as a valid concept. Governments create markets.
-The Death – and Life – of Small Downtown America
-Germany’s ‘post-growth’ movement
-Growth Is the Problem
This sixth-annual conference begins in the morning on Friday November 16 and continues through Sunday afternoon on November 18. The venue is the Prince Conference Center at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The theme of the conference is Vision, Action, Leadership. Headliners at the conference include Daniel Quinn, Steve Keen, Richard Heinberg, Nicole Foss, Albert Bates, and Stephanie Mills.
“Our families, friends, and true companionship are thus among consumerism’s principal casualties. We are hollowing out whole areas of life, of individual and social autonomy, of community, and of nature, and, if we don’t soon wake up, we will lose the chance to return, to reclaim ourselves, our neglected society, our battered world, because there will be nothing left to reclaim, nothing left to return to.” -Gus Speth – America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy.
Various traditional industries rely on the water resources of the region, from paper, gold leaf manufacturing and silk dyeing, to sake and soy sauce production. The arrival of autumn marks the start of many of the processes associated with these industries, as it is during the cold months of the year that water is clear. Biodiversity has supported Kanazawa’s traditional industries at all levels: through the water-regulating function of the forests, through the direct provision of plant materials, and through the workings of the microscopic diversity of organisms involved in the processes of fermentation central to much of the local food culture.
-Spinach power gets a big boost
-Will EU subsidies be enough to encourage greener farming?
-In San Francisco, a secret project bears fruit
What’s the word, I ask the morning, that I should take to the conference?
Open, the day replies mildly, as the horizon stretches in all directions and the clouds move with the wind ever westwards.
