Act: Inspiration

Don’t go back to school: An interview with author Kio Stark

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For college graduates in their 20’s or 30’s facing few job prospects and excessive student debt, graduate school can seem a promising way to sit out the recession. It’s far from a sure bet, though: there’s no guarantee of future employment, it only adds to the mounting debt post-undergrads face, and it consumes time and resources that could be better devoted to making things. But there are alternatives. Don’t Go Back To School is a project by author, NYU instructor, and Yale graduate school dropout Kio Stark exploring other ways to facilitate post-undergrad learning.

Reducing food waste during the holiday season

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The holiday season is a time for gifts, decorations, and lots and lots of food. As a result, it’s also a time of spectacular amounts of waste. In the United States, we generate an extra 5 million tons of household waste each year between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, including three times as much food waste as at other times of the year. When our total food waste adds up to 34 million tons each year, that equals a lot of food. With the holidays now upon us, the Worldwatch Institute offers 10 simple steps we all can take to help make this season less wasteful and more plentiful.

Islands in an Expanding Sea

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The following is the text of an address by Richard Heinberg to the Moana Nui Conference in Honolulu, November 12, 2011. Honolulu was concurrently hosting the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Conference; as a response to that secretive international trade meeting, the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala Ka Po collaborated to organize Moana Nui.

James Kalb interviews Nikos Salingaros on architecture’s influence on society and consumerism

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The work of mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros continues Christopher Alexander’s work on the nature of architectural order, with more development of specifically scientific aspects. A basic point both make is that natural, biological, and urban systems have a great deal in common. In particular, they all function in complex, varying, and adaptive ways on many different levels. For that reason, they can’t be designed in any very comprehensive way but must largely be allowed to evolve through variation and selection.

Connecting the Occupy Movements and the Spanish May 15th Movement

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Three elements have made the global movements of 2011 so powerful and different. 1) the extraordinary capacity to include all types of people 2) the impulse to move beyond traditional forms of the protest and contention, so as to create solutions for the problems identified 3) the horizontal and directly participatory form they take.

In the second phase of these movements, the focus shifts from acts of protest to instituting the type of change that the movements actually want to see happen in society as a whole. The capacity to create solutions grows as the movements expand in all directions, first through the appearance of multiple occupations connected among themselves, and then through the creation of—or collaboration with—groups or networks that are able to solve problems on a local level through cooperation and the sharing of skills and resources.

Reviews: “When All Hell Breaks Loose” and “Organize for Disaster”

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Cody Lundin imparts details that often pester my mind when thinking about emergency scenarios and in so doing makes me far less cavalier about the more grim possibilities. A great deal of this information would be useful right now for my family in Thailand as they suffer through the flood. Indeed there is a very third world flavor to Cody’s frugal, homemade approaches that speaks to me.