Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Humans may pride themselves as being the best evidence for intelligent life on Earth, but an alien observer would record that the (un)sustainability conundrum has the global community floundering in a swamp of cognitive dissonance and collective denial…
“We’re writers with dirt under our fingernails” states the manifesto, and what strikes you is that the new narrative is not some urban dystopia, a tale told by cynical city novelists, it’s directly rooted in the materials of nature. It shares a lineage with English visionaries, dissenters and poets, and yet feels new and modern, planetary, something we are all inventing together.
Joel Salatin, proprietor of Polyface Farms and highly-visible champion of sustainable farming, thinks modern humans have become so far removed from a natural connection to the food they eat, that we no longer have a true understanding of what “normal” food is. In this interview, Chris and Joel explore what constitutes truly sustainable agriculture and the reasons why our current system has departed so far from it, as well as practical steps individuals can take to increase their own personal resiliency around the food they eat (in short: “find your kitchen”, source your food locally, and grow some yourself).
In Sacred Economy, Charles Eisenstein poses the seemingly outrageous idea that money should be sacred. In this he means that a good bit of the mess we’re currently in is because we have lost this sense of the sacred and the special – the connected and interdependent nature of transactions between people.
Now that the financial and political components of the present system have discredited themselves, a fluid situation exists that might allow more viable options to emerge. Local green initiatives, in particular the Transition Towns movement, are gaining in strength and number(s), but do they have the potential to develop the capacity needed at a national level to transform societies’ energy and transport infrastructures?
“Imagining a world without oil” describes in stark detail what might happen if one day the world decided to decommission all its oil tankers, rigs, pipelines and strategic reserves. The authors, environmental scientist Steve Hallett and journalist John Wright, expect that we’d initially see sky-high prices and long lines at pumps. After a few weeks, fuel wouldn’t be had at any price and even first-world citizens would struggle to stay fed and out of the elements. This is no Hollywood doomsday scenario—it’s a levelheaded extrapolation from current trends in the fast deteriorating world energy situation. [An essay prefiguring the book originally appeared in The Washington Post.]
From the toes of our socks to the hem of our necklines, Americans alone consume 25% of the world’s cotton, mostly in the form of clothing and home furnishings. People are often surprised to learn that the world’s largest purveyors of cotton seeds (80-90% of market share in some cotton-producing countries), is a company generally assumed to be focused on food stock. When pulling on their pants in the morning, most people don’t think about Monsanto.
The Community Action Partnership presents here an unprecedented and extraordinary report: “Facing the New Reality: Preparing Poor America for Harder Times Ahead.” This report is based on the equally extraordinary premise that much of what passes for reality in “the popular narrative” is not based on reality but instead on a collective denial of a genuine reality too difficult for most Americans to fully comprehend or accept.
One of the reasons for moral panics, it’s argued, is that the underlying phenomenon is too difficult to discuss directly. In the early 1960s, the notion of an affluent working class, which might not behave the same way as the existing middle classes, represented such an underlying social fear. In the end that cohort was the bedrock of Thatcher’s electoral success. Now that 30 years of neoliberalism has once more stripped that brief moment of affluence from the working class – at least in relative terms – the spectre of the young urban poor, and the hidden fear of the return of the English mob, is certainly enough to cause a moral panic. The other question that has emerged in our post-crisis scenarios is, where does the anger go? At least we have one answer to that now.
“We tend to characterize every civilization in terms of “preclassic, classic, and postclassic,” but we might do better to think of it as “stable and expanding,” “unstable,” and “shrinking and reconsolidating.” Preclassic Maya agriculture was exceedingly diverse, with agroforestry, household garden plots, rotational field crops, chinampas and aquaponic systems, and perhaps also novel farming techniques we have yet to learn about. So was the postclassic.”
One of the hardest concepts for many Americans to absorb is this – that technical feasibility rests on a complex bed of other feasibilities and never stands alone. Thus, simply observing that it is technically possible to, say, create zero impact cities or to run our cars on corn waste does not usefully tell us whether we are going to do so or not. This historical reality stands in stark contrast to the perceptions that many of us have, which is that technology operates as a kind of vending machine into which one puts quarters and gets inevitable results.
This post is both my own experiences of living through Hurricane Irene on Sunday, 8/29/11, and a few thoughts about what is truly dangerous and what kills people in this type of storm. Most of the “news” clips are deaths from Hurricane Irene. These dramatic photos are all Hurricane Irene today, in Western MA (and one from Southern VT). I hope they give you sober reflection. Let’s be careful out there, those of us on the Eastern Seaboard of the USA. Even as the sun shines, most of the dangers of a hurricane happen AFTER the winds and rains die down.
