Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Three years ago, two friends and I wondered: could students pay teachers with vegetables, chocolate, and advice? Would teachers feel comfortable asking students for help? Would anyone get excited about bartering for knowledge?
Psychologist Kathy McMahon (aka “Peak Shrink”) warns people against the impulse to make big changes within the first couple of years after finding out about peak oil. “Don’t make any huge changes.” she says “Do the things that you think are important where you are, but don’t panic and do something dramatic. Let it sink in.”
Sacred Economics (2012) – short film by Ian MacKenzie, a teaser on the ideas of Charles Eisenstein and the return of the gift. Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme – but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.
-German bill may force Google to pay for news snippets
-Publishers be damned!
-The Defence of the Book: a story by Julian Barnes – Wonderful stuff!
The dominant focus on advanced technologies and higher-level politics, I argue here, has limited value for understanding crucial elements in processes of technological change that take place in society, therewith touching upon key democratic values. This is illustrated with introduced changes to rice cultivation. Technological change is often associated with innovation.
-Follow the Food
-Eight is Great Challenge
-Changing the Way We Eat: Bringing the Backyard to the Bronx
-From Toxic Soil, an Unlikely Garden
To understand how America’s empire works and why its fall is imminent, it’s useful to trace the trajectory of its rise. That’s a complex matter, because the United States may be a single political unit but it’s never been a single culture or country, and its empire emerged out of a long struggle between competing visions of national expansion. To understand those, it’s necessary to begin with the early days of European settlement — and the demographic cataclysm that preceded it.
Driving down any rural highway in northern New Mexico, you are sure to come across a valley with acequias—irrigation ditches that in some cases have existed for several centuries.
This February 27 [was] “Occupy the Food Supply” day. It reflects a longstanding call from food activists nationwide to “fix our broken food system.” With 50 million food insecure people in the US, an epidemic of diet-related diseases, a “dead zone” the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico (caused by fertilizer runoff) and a steady stream of E.coli outbreaks from industrialized food, “fixing” the food system seems a reasonable–and urgent—demand.
-Greece: The potato revolt
-The Eurozone youth of today
-Spanish revolt brews as national economic rearmament begins in Europe
-PUNK ECONOMICS – LESSON 2
Today, in Lewes, we spend about fifty million pounds a year on food and drink and most of that – at least forty million – is spent in our three supermarkets: Tesco, Waitrose and Aldi. In those hundred years – and especially the last fifty years since I was born – we’ve managed to let all this natural capital be diverted into the hands of a few multinational corporations. Our local food economies have dried up; local money no longer circulates around and about the town, building wealth and relationships as it goes. A tenner spent locally multiplies many times over as it circulates. Spent in a supermarket, that tenner goes straight out of town and into the hands of Tesco and co, and its shareholders.
Even though there is huge fear, dislocation, unemployment and suffering powering through Europe and America just as it has been powering through so many other parts of the world for so long. Even when it becomes absolutely clear that in the current system, in order to keep those at the top ‘safe’’, everyone else is being pulverised as the financiers and their professional and political accomplices are rescued with the money of the rest of us. Even though that financial crisis is fast becoming a sovereign debt crisis and the free market’s gun is being held to country after country’s heads in Europe just as the IMF has done for decades elsewhere. Even though the oil tanker of economic growth is fast developing huge holes that no billions of dollars can plug. Even though, or should we say, because of this: we are living in a hugely hopeful moment.
