Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Last September, People & Planet — the largest student network in Britain campaigning to end world poverty, defend human rights and protect the environment — launched Scoop: a student food co-operative project in partnership with Food Co-ops experts Sustain. Scoops aim to help students and staff gain access to local, organic, sustainable, healthy food at affordable prices.
Brown rice diets, asceticism and vows of silence and/or poverty have much in common with marathons, martial arts, the Aboriginal walkabout, and boot camp. The common theme is ordeal.
Each time we resolve to “never again” punish ourselves with such sacrifice, pain, fatigue and sweat, we wipe all that resolution away in the instant that we reach our goal, when we have our moment of light and love and ecstatic remembrance that this is what life is all about.
Perhaps the pain and disappointment of Rio+20 and all the other conferences that promised so much and delivered so little are mere ordeal, the prelude to the ultimate awakening.
For many people, including the 24 dead, the storm was a disaster. Something good, however, can still come out of this — the realization that preparedness is not something you do occasionally when the weather forecasts a major storm, but something that becomes part of your life. Because otherwise, there is simply no way to be ready for the myriad of small disasters that happen in ordinary lives.
America has a new word to learn: Dilbit. Dilbit, short for diluted bitumen, is a combination of tar sands crude (bitumen) and dangerous liquid chemicals like benzene (the dilutant) used to thin crude so it can be piped to refineries. And there is a lot of it being piped into America — in some cases through the backyards of communities that don’t even know it’s there.
The social dimensions of the end of growth are coming into clearer focus with each passing month –from last year’s Occupy uprisings, to the recent NATO demonstrations in Chicago, to mass demonstrations in Spain, and on and on. Also clearer is the desperate strategy of the powerful, which consists primarily of the militarization of the police and the criminalization of dissent.
Michael Shuman’s latest book, Local Dollars, Local Sense is valuable for three different groups of readers: sustainability activists seeking to seeking financial support for small locally owned businesses; local business owners seeking start-up and expansion capital; and investors — both “accredited” and “unaccredited” — seeking to move their IRA accounts and other Wall Street holdings to safer, more profitable and more socially responsible and environmentally friendly investments.
– A Climate Scientist Battles Time and Mortality
– Green sculptor-farmer in his studio-yurt: Arlo Acton of North San Juan
– “A Face in the Crowd”: Andy Griffith’s rivetting premiere as a folksy sociopath
– Bookchin on Bookchin: An appeal for support (for a documentary)
– Ivan Illich: Writing on the Web
With July Fourth coming up, you can expect to hear lots of discussion on the left and in the green community about how bad “independence” really is — no matter how cool you may think the Founding Fathers were.
The Centre for Alternative Technology has just published a new book called “The Home Energy Handbook: a guide to saving and generating energy in your home and community”. It is a great resource for Transition groups, and Transition features strongly through the book. I spoke to Allan Shepherd, one of the book’s authors/editors, and asked him to tell us more about the book.
– Review: “The Blood of the Earth” by John Michael Greer
– Movie review: “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (something sustaining in a cynical time)
– New book: “Finding Our Way Forward”
– Revolution – new TV series on NBC about life after the grid goes down
The current period can be undoubtedly characterized as an economical, ecological, cultural, political, but also moral crisis. The solution seems to be as far off as ever and problems seem to be getting worse by the day everywhere. Why is that, what can we expect in the future and what are the safe outcomes from this future bottleneck? We have been talking to Nathan Hagens at the latest ASPO conference in Vienna…
The novel describes a future in which humans have evolved into an entirely new species, the Neu-humans. They are distinguished by their short tails, freckled appearance and super-intelligence—along with a strong tribal sensibility that compels them to tread lightly upon the planet and always make decisions rationally. The story involves an archaeological journey to the “Lands of Oregon,” from what is now northern Canada, to discover the missing link between humans and Neu-humans. The year is 3100.
