Act: Inspiration

The map is not the territory

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This is the grove I come to each spring, first with the daffodils, and later with the bluebells and red campion. This is the season, between the Equinox and May Day, when England is her most green and exuberant. I love this spring moment. I love English marshes and Welsh hills, the deserts of Arizona, the valleys of Ecuador, the islands of Greece, the forests of Mexico. I have traversed many lands, sat with a thousand flowers and learned their medicine. I have climbed trees, swum in wild water, and spent a big part of my life immersed in the fabric of nature, trying to find words for the wild, the beautiful and the free . . .But what on earth has this got to do with Transition?

Reclaiming ‘common sense’: new pamphlet is a rallying cry to the 99%

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We are in revolutionary times in the specific sense that the governing orthodoxy that bounded what we understood to be practical and sensible turned out to be complete delirium. The analogies with the situation in revolutionary America seem very strong and unforced.

The shadow bailout: How big banks bilk US towns and taxpayers

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The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times.; In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates–the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps–were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.

The REconomy Project Local Entrepreneurs Conference, Totnes

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The shift towards seeing Transition in terms of the rebuilding of local, resilient economies continues apace. One of the key evolutions in this, a step change in thinking about what Transition looks like in practice, took place in Totnes yesterday. Called the ‘Local Entrepreneur Forum’, it was introduced in the promotional material thus: “There’s never been a greater need to rethink our economy, especially at the local level. Social and sustainable enterprise represents the future, and here in Totnes, we’re not just waiting for the future to happen. We’re inventing it”. The idea was to bring entrepreneurs, investors and experts together, inspire them with possibilities, mix them up and see what happens. It was to prove a heady brew.

TaskRabbit: Running errands for fun and profit

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Leah Busque, the founder and chief product officer at TaskRabbit, is a former IBM software engineer who started her company to solve a problem she had one very cold evening in Boston. She ran out of dog food at home and wished there was someone she could pay to run the errand. She thought: “it’s a simple problem, there should be a simple solution.” That was February 2008. She went online that evening, registered runmyerrand.com, quit her job at IBM four months later, and spent the next year building the initial service.

Preparing for the unimaginable

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One of the lessons of Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan is that the events that have caused the greatest changes (and collectively most of the substantive change) to our civilization and our way of life were completely unexpected, unpredictable “black swan events. His new book argues that rather than trying to plan and prepare for a future we can’t predict, we should do things that improve our resilience, and create systems that are “anti-fragile”. Unlike most fragile, complicated human-made systems, “anti-fragile” systems (such as evolution and other complex natural systems) actively adapt to, learn from and benefit from upheaval and dramatic change.

Executive order – National defense resources preparedness

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Last Friday, with little publicity, President Obama signed a national preparedness executive order that gives US government (USG) cabinet agencies the ability to exercise total control over what are essentially all the resources of the USA.

In my humble opinion, this could also be the USG’s way of telling us that it knows Peak Oil has arrived, and that the age of energy and resource scarcity has officially begun.
(suggested by an EB reader)

Tackling inequality: a new role for the state

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In the last thirty years, a rising share of the global economic pie has been colonised by the world’s rich. It is this concentration of income that is the real cause of the present crisis. It created the conditions for the 2008 Crash and is now driving us into an era of near-permanent slump.

MOSES Conference: Growing the next generation of farmers

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Strength in numbers! More than 3,600 farmers strong gathered for the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin the last weekend in February, and it was an amazing experience. The conference featured keynotes by food policy expert Margaret Krome and Food Corps director Curt Ellis, a cornucopia of training opportunities focused on all aspects of organic farming, and a special “Young Organic Stewards” track for newcomers and beginning farmers with specialized workshops and social events.

Biodiversity in Kanazawa: Spring’s Lesson

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The ecosystems around Kanazawa’s urban area have played an important role in giving shape to the physical form of the city in terms of its functionality and aesthetics, and in sustaining its lifestyles. The city’s rise as a flourishing cultural centre was made possible by the diversity of the surrounding ecosystems — from forests to freshwater, to plains and marine environments — which provided it with an abundance of resources and services. As the city’s space was being molded in response to climatic factors, and based on local socio-cultural categories, specific resource uses and practices for managing the biodiversity of these surrounding ecosystems emerged.

Energy in East Africa

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In most East African countries access to electricity is very low. Besides electricity, there is a basic need for energy. In Eastern African countries most of the energy consumed is produced from traditional solid biomasses, such as the burning of wood.

The search for combustibles begins early in the morning, includes several hours of walking, and, in cases where no trees are to be found, digging for roots with bare hands; in some regions this activity is accompanied by the constant danger of violent and sexual assaults. In areas where there is no wood left for burning, cow dung or other waste is used for fuel.