Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I hastened to buy Local Dollars, Local Sense by Michael Shuman, because I was attracted to the title and had high hopes for the emphasis on localization. Shuman’s book represents a small step in a needed direction, but I was yearning for much deeper.
-Sun, sewage and algae: a recipe for success?
-One of Largest Wind Farms Built in Ohio
-‘Germans Are Willing to Pay’ for Renewable Energies- Interview
-Wadebridge, the UK’s first solar-powered town – video
-Packing some power
-Controversial renewable energy report branded ‘shoddy nonsense’
In the classic game Risk, your goal is to dominate your rival players by killing them off and conquering their territories until your Empire stretches across the globe. In Monopoly, the “world’s favorite family game brand” (according to publisher Parker Brothers), your goal is to dominate your rival players through economic obliteration until they are penniless while you literally own everything. In a way, the combination of Risk and Monopoly perfectly mirror two of the most destructive pillars of our society: runaway capitalism and unflinching imperialism.
“We are revitalizing an ancient form of transportation … using just the power of the wind and the tides … to move goods and people,” says skipper Fulvio Casali. In their CSA (community supported agriculture), the Salish Sea Trading Cooperative uses nearly no petroleum to transport organic produce and other goods from the north Olympic Peninsula to northwest Seattle…Come on board with cofounders Casali, Kathy Pelish, and Alex Tokar, who are patiently redeveloping the skills and infrastructure for the return of “a whole fleet of sailboats blanketing Puget Sound” in the post-petroleum era.
Laurence Schechtman is the founder and coordinator for Neighborhood Vegetables in the San Francisco East Bay, which he started four and a half years ago. Neighborhood Vegetables is a grassroots network of 2,500 volunteers who help each other plant urban vegetable gardens in their yards.
The city of Boulder, Colo., has won the right to take its power supply—and carbon emissions—away from corporate control. The change for Boulder came in November when voters passed two ballot measures that allow the city to begin the process of forming its own municipal power utility.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, grains account for more than half of the calories consumed by people in developing countries. Yet, over the last few decades, grain production has been narrowed to only a limited number of varieties – wheat, for example, has over 200,000 varieties, yet only a few genetic lines are being used. Such dependence on a limited number of crops has proven problematic, especially because of rising food prices, climate change, and health concerns.
– NPR: Occupy May Seem To Be Receding, But Look Closer
– ‘Port Huron’ Turns 50 as Occupy Turns 5 (Months)
– Journal for Occupied Studies
– George Lakey: Mass actions or focused campaigns?
– Staughton Lynd: A Letter To Other Occupiers
I was thinking of Seuss this morning, because my children are anxious to celebrate his birthday, but also because it strikes me that the world-turned-upside-down qualities of our present situation are in some ways Seussian. And how surprising is that, when so many of us were formed by his writing? I suspect, thinking about Seuss’s endings and stories, that maybe we owe him more than we think – some measure of our ability to process reality, rather than fantasy, may come precisely from the fantasy creator.
Let me start by giving a brief speculation about why people from so many backgrounds are embracing the commons. First of all, it is a way for people to assert the integrity of their existing communities, or to try to reclaim that integrity. The commons also provides a way to assert a moral relationship to certain resources and people that are endangered by market forces. It’s a way of saying, “That _________ (water, air, software code, cultural tradition) belongs to me. It is part of my life and identity.”
Not only are high levels of growth an undesirable goal and an utterly insufficient rubric for assessing the ‘common wealth’, it is also simply not possible to return to the annualized GDP growth of the post-war ‘golden age’.
I’ve returned from a sobering United Nations-led tour of six tsunami-damaged communities and two radiation-impacted cities in Northern Japan. The obvious conclusion: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident is forcing Japan to go green, including the launch of a new renewable energy national feed-in tariff that starts in July. Meanwhile the governor of Fukushima, Yuhei Sato, told us that renewables will be the “key factor” in the revival of his cesium-laden prefecture.
