Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I just don’t see local communities making better choices than those made at the state and federal level. This may happen in isolated pockets, but by the same token you could see vast swaths of places overturning the few gains the environmental movement has achieved on the level of federal and state policies and regulations, which is exactly what the Tea Party wants to do.
As we progress further into descent, we will see more electricity brownouts, blackouts, and other events where there is a sudden failure of complexity, resulting in a shutdown of productivity. This failure of complexity has created a new urban word: “digital snow day.” And since our digital snow day in Anchorage coincided this time with termination dust on the mountains, the name is especially fitting. When we lose complexity suddenly, much of modern life stops, as our subsystems are highly connected. When complexity brownouts occur, what systems will be impacted, and what will some of those snow days look like? Does digitization make the failures worse, with a drop to a lower trophic level than would have occurred without digitization?
Personally I’m at the cusp of stay-at-home-mom returning to the workforce. The landscape of the working world has completely transformed during the decade-and-a-half I’ve been out of it. I’d done quite a bit of volunteer work, but that is a very different scene. I was facing going back to classes to gear up to reenter the corporate world I left many years ago, all the while knowing that corporate world was on self-destruct like some massive Death Star, or …
Or what?
George Lakey has campaigned and written about non-violent social change since the 1960s. He says:
“… people get farther if they do have a vision of the new society and that be a widely shared vision that comes about through a discussion. That process seems to be very important, that people both develop a vision of where they want to go and also a strategy from getting from here to there.”
The nuns provide a model for all who are exploring ways in which humanity can reconstitute itself and forge a post-industrial culture that radically departs from the paradigm of industrial civilization. Members of Sisters Of The Earth are deeply involved not only with social justice issues, but with local organic food efforts, permaculture, the Transition movment, raising awareness on climate change, economic justice, and sustainable living.
The relationship between money and community is not very obvious if only because we tend to regard money as a “real thing,” not an artificial social creation and abstraction. Fortunately, a recent essay in Cultural Anthropology Online (May 2012) offers some helpful insights into the ways in which money and community are inextricably connected.
Shockingly (or not so much, if you read here regularly), despite the supposed improvements in the economy, more and more American families are struggling to put meals on the table. The USDA reports a record 46.7 million American households are on food stamps. 17.9 % of American households (up 700,000 from 2010) didn’t have enough food at least some of the time.
The second book in our Community Resilience Guides series with Chelsea Green Publishing, Power From the People illustrates how communities across the country are already generating their own energy at the local level. From citizen-owned wind turbines to co-op biofuel producers to community-wide initiatives combining multiple resources and technologies, Pahl outlines the steps necessary and plan, organize, finance and launch community energy projects.
A little over a week to go until the Transition Network conference 2012, and it is all getting very exciting. The idea here is to put some flesh on the bones of what looks set to be our most stimulating conference yet. Although things are still being finalised, here’s what we know so far…
After months of waiting, worrying and hoping, the clouds finally arrived here at Yellabird Farm last week and brought us the long-sought gift of good rain. It was a great two days of slow and soaking moisture that the cracked soil guzzled up with gusto. Seven inches was the tally. And it has brightened up the spirits of all of us: man, woman, child, goat, chicken, cow, clover, oak tree, frog, songbird. The whole living community around here is crying out with joy.
The crew of Sol Mobile Farm is bringing new meaning to the term “food movement.” In June 2012, the team of four started on a sixth month trip. They would travel, they decided, from North Carolina, up the East Coast, over to the West Coast, down to the South, and then back again in a 57 passenger red school bus.
“Road trip” sounds better, but it was of course a rail trip, taking in 10 places over 1,500 miles in 22 train legs in 11 days – from Totnes to Maidenhead, Lewes, Brixton, Norwich, Durham, Dunbar nr Edinburgh, Slaithwaite, Manchester and Hereford then back to Devon…I finish my roadtrip inspired and enthused by the fledgling local economic work that I have seen. It’s planting the seeds of a new local economy and providing extensive learning opportunities. The power of this work so far, as well as providing some jobs for people of course, is that it’s starting to change the story about our economy.
