Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On November 2nd nearly 70 students walked out of an introductory economics class at Harvard in solidarity with the Occupy movement. The mainstream media largely ignored the protest. That’s regrettable since the economics profession has provided the intellectual framework and justification for the inequality and centralization of corporate power the Occupiers are challenging.
An extensive study by the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has concluded that highly toxic and cancer-causing fluids from shale gas drilling most likely contaminated shallow groundwater in Pavillion, Wyoming. The findings, which strengthen the hands of those calling for a public inquiry on B.C.’s shale gas industry, contradict industry claims that hydraulic fracturing “is a proven technology used safely for more than 60 years in more than a million wells.”
– Krugman: Depression and Democracy
– Anarchist Anthropology – OWS house theorist on debt and the gift economy
– What is Debt? – An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber
– Global rebellion: The coming chaos?
Like buses, you wait for ages for Energy Descent Action Plans to come along, and then two come along at once. This month sees the publication of two new EDAPs, from Llambed in mid-Wales, and Dunbar in East Lothian, Scotland. These two high quality pieces of work represent two communities taking the idea of an EDAP and rooting it to their place, their community, their challenges.
What would it be like to invest in—not just eat from—the veggie farmers, cheese artisans and ranchers at the local farmers’ market?
As part of the promotion of The Transition Companion, Emilio Mula made these 10 short films of different stories from the book. The recent BBC series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ beautifully told the story of the evolution of human history illustrated by 100 objects chosen from the British Museum’s collection. We used a similar approach to tell the story of the emerging and unfolding Transition movement, which in its short life has spread to 35 countries around the world from its humble beginnings in Kinsale, Ireland.
What do we understand by the term food justice? Is it the search for accessible, affordable and healthy food for all? Or is there a role for food in tackling today’s larger-than-self problems?
Occupy Wall Street found a new home this week—not a new park, or a plaza, or a square, but a house.
Farmers have been through this before — our lives and livelihoods falling under corporate control. It has been an ongoing process: consolidation of markets; consolidation of seed companies; an ever-widening gap between our costs of production and the prices we receive. Some of us are catching on, getting the picture of the real enemy.
The Occupy movement is a start. But the stakes are rising. The earth is dying. The biocidal industrial economy, while coming apart at the seams, still rages on. …And what if the industrial disease DOESN’T die with collapse? What then? And what does that imply for resistance movements?
– Occupy protesters blocking gates at West Coast ports, halt operations at some
– Launching a New Online Library that Can’t Be Destroyed
– (Re)learning the Value of Place and Occupying a Sustainable Future
– The Fracturing of Occupy Wall Street
The power of the Transition to Unsustainability relies on the threat of physical force backed up by the story that there is no alternative: that there is no way of belonging. Here in Scotland (as I am sure elsewhere) that story has been given the lie over the last 15 years as communities on the west coast have taken back their land into community ownership.
