Act: Inspiration

Why Bill Gates Needs To Listen To More Gamelan Music

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Balinese farmers have been growing rice in terraces since at least the eleventh century. Because the island’s volcanic rock is rich in mineral nutrients, water running off mountains fills the rice paddies to create a kind of aquarium.This system has enabled farmers to grow two crops of rice a year year for centuries. They do this using a unique form of cooperative agriculture that enables farming to flourish despite water scarcity and the constant threat of disease and pests.

Walking out on empire

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So what do we do now? At what point does one realize that his or her paradigm isn’t working anymore, and give up and walk out on empire? How do we start walking, and where do we go? Here are some quotes from notable people who are choosing to turn at the crossroads and walk away from empire and then to talk about the transition. These quotes highlight some of their answers to the question of “what now?”

A Food Commons Grows in Detroit

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The growing movement to provide us healthy local and organic foods offers an alternative food system that is built upon commons-based institutions such as food cooperatives, farmers’ markets, nonprofit sustainable agriculture and food justice organizations as well as individuals with a vision that what we eat is more than just another product judged only for its price and the profit it produces. This becomes especially true in an economically challenged place like Detroit, which is not a food desert as many people think but rather the home of many flourishing food commons providing fresh, healthy sustenance to inner city people.

Resilience through simplification: revisiting Tainter’s theory of collapse (part 2)

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While Tainter’s theory of social complexity has much to commend it, in this paper I wish to examine and ultimately challenge Tainter’s conclusion that voluntary simplification is not a viable path to sustainability. In fact, I will argue that it is by far our best bet, even if the odds do not provide grounds for much optimism. Moreover, should sustainability prove too ambitious a goal for industrial civilisation, I contend that simplification remains the most effective means of building ‘resilience’ (i.e. the ability of an individual or community to withstand societal or ecological shocks) [Part 2]

Apologies to Mexico: The Drug Trade and GNP (Gross National Pain)

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I apologize. There are so many things I could apologize for, from the way the U.S. biotech corporation Monsanto has contaminated your corn to the way Arizona and Alabama are persecuting your citizens, but right now I’d like to apologize for the drug war, the 10,000 waking nightmares that make the news and the rest that don’t.

A New Era of Worker Ownership?

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The workers of the just-formed New Era Windows cooperative in Chicago—the same workers who sat in and forced Serious Energy to back down on a hasty shutdown of their Goose Island plant a few months ago, and famously occupied the same factory for six days in December 2008—are doing more than putting together a bold plan for worker ownership. They are likely to move the entire subject into national attention, thereby spurring others to follow on. Though they have a powerful start, if the past is any guide they will need all the help they can get—financial as well as political.

The Dark Shapes Ahead

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If someone were to ask me what kind of cause is sufficient to live for in dark times, the best answer I could give would be: to take responsibility for the survival of something that matters deeply. Whatever that is, your best action might then be to get it out of harm’s way, or to put yourself in harm’s way on its behalf, or anything else your sense of responsibility tells you.

Peak oil oppositional disorder: neurosis or psychosis?

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What happens to individuals also happens to entire societies. Take a neurotic Peak Oil-denying industrial civilization, put it through a terrible global financial crisis, tell it that economic growth is over forever, and what you get a psychotic, delusional industrial civilization.