The Lavender Hill Mob
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.
Act: Inspiration
A drop in the bucket has a ripple effect: Lessons learned from founding Stanford’s Free Store
Our initial proposal was called the Stanford Re-Use Campaign, but, in hindsight, a more accurate title would have been Baiting People with Free Stuff to Change Their Consumer Behavior.
Bristol Pound marks new era for local money
Today’s launch of the Bristol Pound (£B) represents a step change for the UK local currency movement, one which nef is very proud to have supported as part of our Community Currency 2.0 project.
A write-up of the 2012 Transition Network conference. The best yet.
Transition folks from around the world gathered last weekend at Battersea Arts Centre for the 6th annual Transition Network conference. In a week when the Arctic ice reached its smallest ever extent, scientists warned that the world’s weather could be on the verge of running amok and it was suggested that Saudi Arabia, always meant to be the ‘swing producer’ on whom the rest of the world could depend for reliable oil supplies, may become a net importer of oil by 2030, the theme of the conference was, appropriately, ‘Building resilience in extraordinary times’.
A life of abundance without money
Daniel Suelo, 51, has spent the morning gorging himself on young green shoots of tumbleweed and fixing a rack to the back of his new (gifted) bike with a spool of bailing wire. Suelo gets around on a bike or by the flick of his thumb, on discarded spools of bailing wire and other useful throwaways, and on the generosity of others. Money has been absent from his life ever since he gave away the last of his savings twelve years ago, a move he says brought an authenticity and richness to his life that wasn’t there before.
A write-up of the 2012 Transition Network conference. The best yet.
Transition folks from around the world gathered last weekend at Battersea Arts Centre for the 6th annual Transition Network conference. In a week when the Arctic ice reached its smallest ever extent, scientists warned that the world’s weather could be on the verge of running amok and it was suggested that Saudi Arabia, always meant to be the ‘swing producer’ on whom the rest of the world could depend for reliable oil supplies, may become a net importer of oil by 2030, the theme of the conference was, appropriately, ‘Building resilience in extraordinary times’.
Hopeful Harvest: Food and agriculture as a foundation for peace in Northern Afghanistan
This apparent disconnect between the symptoms of a failed state and the remedies suggested by what is seen to constitute its healthy counterpart makes it difficult to imagine a way out of failed-statehood. We contend that it is necessary to rethink what a failed state is, to understand, at a rather more practical, grassroots level, the drivers of failed or successful societies.
New Zealand grappling with the “Rights of Nature”
Can we begin to reconceptualize how we interact with Nature and afford it the legal protections that are now available only to people? Along with Bolivia and Ecuador, New Zealand appears to be in the vanguard of this fascinating, welcome trend.
The green tea ecosystem of Shizuoka
Throughout Japan there exist landscapes called satoyama in which people live and work in harmony with nature by combining traditional wisdom with scientific knowledge to practice agriculture in a manner that nurtures biodiversity. This article complements the video brief that looks at green tea produced in the village of Higashiyama, Kakegawa City, Shizuoka by using grassland resources to protect and augment soil, yielding a high quality product and giving haven to other plants, some of them important to Japanese culture.
When mental health becomes an economic issue (and what to do about it…)
The challenge today is to learn how to identify the need for and to accept help with emotional problems quickly, and to recognize that not doing so could mean taking an economic as well as psychological hit.
Postcard From Eastern Oregon: When planting food is illegal
This Spring my farming partners and I found ourselves landless…Last year I wrote an article, “Who Will Feed The People?”, discussing the challenges to small-scale agriculture in the United States, such as lack of equipment, knowledge, financial resources, and markets; the polluted wasteland left behind by conventional farming; increasingly volatile and unpredictable weather patterns brought by Climate Change; and, last but not least, the social barriers: people of the U.S. are by and large uninterested in significant changes to the socio-economic status quo, and resist cutting edge projects.
OWS begins ‘Year II’ with three-day convergence and call to debt resistance
September 17 (S17) is of course the one-year anniversary of the occupation of Zuccotti Park, a reclaiming of public space that galvanized the political imagination of the country and the world with its proclaimed opposition between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, its prefigurative emphasis on horizontality and mutual aid, and its linking of grievances from climate change to Stop and Frisk to predatory debt. All summer, OWS organizers have poured their energy into preparing for a three-day convergence of “education, celebration and resistance” to mark the anniversary…
