Act: Inspiration

Translating Transition: from small town to mega-city

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“How can you possibly do this in L.A.?” people familiar with the Transition model often ask me. Even people who live here find the idea quite daunting. One local Permaculture teacher, when asked “What about LA?”, literally threw up his hands in a gesture that said “It’s hopeless.”

Los Angeles is a mega-city. At 11 million people, we’re somewhere between 8th and 15th on the list of the world’s largest. We’re one of the biggest population centers that have dared to actively work with the Transition model. Just for the record: it isn’t categorically “hopeless.”

Together: The Rituals Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (book review)

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As if recovering from the binge of market triumphalism that crested in 2008, the Zeitgeist is now unleashing a steady stream of new works on cooperation. The rediscovery of this aspect of our humanity is long overdue and incredibly important, given the deformities of thinking that economics has inflicted on public consciousness. So I was excited to learn that the distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett had written a new book about cooperation, Together: The Rituals Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation.

How many circles does it take to make a community?

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I have read some of the “energy descent plans” of some of the leading Transition communities, and they strike me as being long on ideals and objectives and short on credible strategy — how to get there from here…I have come to realize that our future is so “unimaginable” that strategic planning is impossible…Instead, I wondered if it made sense to have…a “Working Towards” plan — specific ideas for helping us (1) build community and increase collaboration and sharing, (2) reduce dependence on imports and centralized systems and increase self-sufficiency, and (3) prepare psychologically and increase resilience for whatever the future holds.

Could we do this using the Resilience Circle model?

A city that runs on itself

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What happens when you ask 14 landscape architecture and three planning students to cut the energy use and consequent greenhouse gas (GHG) production in the city by at least 80 percent — by 2050? How is this to be done? We started by looking at the city of Vancouver as it is now, finding the places where energy use was high and where it was low, and trying to understand why.

Rethink & Relocalize

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Raymond De Young is an academic who isn’t working for a military think-tank, or explaining why we should just keep climbing the consumer ladder. His new “Localization Reader” will likely fall into hands that get dirty in gardens, and active in your community. De Young is Associate Professor of Environmental Psychology and Planning, in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, at the University of Michigan.

We screwed up: A letter of apology to my granddaughter

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I wrote the following letter to my granddaughter, Madeline, who is almost four years old. Although she cannot read it today, I hope she will read it in a future that proves so much better than the one that is probable, and so terribly unfair. I’m sharing this letter with other parents and grandparents in the hope that it may move them to embrace their roles as citizens and commit to the hard work of making the planet viable, the economy equitable, and our culture democratic for the many Madelines to come.

On being in time for Transition

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At a time when entire peoples — and species — have lost their homes to flooding, deforestation, war, agribusiness and other forms of hatred and greed, when health has been lost to the increasing toxicity and the decreasing nutritional quality of food, it may be that we no longer have time to indulge in the moral miasma of an urgent need to create a more positive future. Our only time is now, a now that holds the whole complexities of hope and suffering, joy and negativity.

Digging in the couch cushions for loose change: Or, why don’t we just create more resources?

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Let’s scrap the misleading language of “creating more resources.” When was the last time you made a fish or some oil? Instead, let’s try and get a real sense of what high oil prices are driving us to do – digging around in our couch cushions for loose change.

Bad knowledge and the promise of the university (response to Immanuel Wallerstein)

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In a recent blog-post sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein writes, “the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus … of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order.”…Wallerstein has developed a world systems model of modernization and empire aimed at creating this better world. It is understandable that he mourns the docile, flaccid, opportunistic, and sometimes destructive contributions of the university as increasing social inequality, militarism, various forms of corruption, debt, unemployment, biophysical forces and natural resource scarcities are decimating human societies…Nonetheless, the historical precedent for such leadership from universities is to my knowledge non-existent.

Strengthening Local Economies: Michael Shuman on Investing in Small Businesses – web event

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Not even 1 percent of Americans’ long-term savings are invested locally, largely because it’s just not possible under the current system. But what would our towns look like if a larger fraction of this $30 trillion were in local economies?