Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Randy White, Founder of Bright Neighbor and Co-Author of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force Report ““Descending the Oil Peak: Navigating the Transition from Oil and Natural Gas”, presents “The Sharing Economy: A Plan B For Moving America Forward” at TEDxSoMa in San Francisco. The presentation outlines community response plans in case of economic collapse.
When looking through the lens of collaborative consumption or the mesh, it’s easy to see how many of our needs can be met through sharing with others to some lesser or greater degree. Surveying this communally inclined world, we find that our homes, cars, jobs, time, and more can easily be shared. Land is another asset that can and should be shared, one that is in high demand as rising food prices and the desire for healthy food blooms alongside the “Grow Your Own” movement’s current momentum.
I don’t think we’re really going to understand this friction between, and the potential energy arising from, transition and “activism/action” unless the latter term gets further granularity. “Transition justice” is a new term and probably means different things to everyone. How this gets woven explicitly into the framing of Transition is a question we’ve not answered yet. But at least we’re asking that question.
Here’s a thought. One way into several of the policy issues dominating British news headlines — from the future of the national health service, to the Southern Cross catastrophe, to the funding of higher education — is to look at them through the lens of Jane Jacobs’ distinction, in her book Systems of Survival, between systems based on territory (“guardians”) and systems based on exchange (“traders”). Most human societies need both. But when we get the distinctions between them blurred, breakdown and corruption follows.
Yesterday I counted 85 spears of asparagus nudging their way up through the soil (Asparagus may be finished in some parts of the country, but we’re zone 4 here in cold upstate New York). I crawled along the row on my hands and knees, pushing aside clumps of rotted manure to reveal each spear. I ran inside and proudly reported the figure to my husband Bob. Then I called my mom, and told her, too. It took me longer to get this asparagus growing than it did to earn a Ph.D. I consider the achievement just as significant.
As the economic crisis stretches on, religious congregations are playing a vital role in helping people cope. For many, Resilience Circles (also called Common Security Clubs) are a way to help members confront and address their economic insecurities.
Recently, a group of Resilience Circle leaders has been discussing the idea of a “theology for community resilience.” How do the resources of our faith traditions support and empower our communities during this time of economic and ecological challenge?
I am perplexed by the almost complete lack of pedestrian streets in North America. Why is it that car-free commons—designed for pleasurable strolling, shopping and hanging out—which have become as typical as stoplights or McDonalds in European city centers, are almost non-existent here?
When the formal economy fails, the informal economy is needed – and yet we have stripped the informal economy over the last decades. How to rebuild is a huge question – and one whose radicalism can’t be overstated. It involves completely reinventing our economy, among other things, since the domestic informal economy stands against industrial growth capitalism and undermines the idea that we can have economy based largely on consumer spending. If you make, rather than buy, well, that changes a lot of things.
-Back to the Future
-Behaviour change, not technology, is key to cutting vehicle emissions
-The great land grab: India’s war on farmers
Within a society where physical consumerism has been the norm, consuming events — we might call it intellectual consumerism — is a real issue. I see it a lot in my native Los Angeles, particularly within the old-style environmental circles. People show up for a meeting or a movie or a political rally, but it doesn’t scratch the surface. There’s no lifestyle change, or there’s negligible lifestyle change to go with it. They show up for the meetings but then go home to same-old, same-old. It’s revealed by their small talk, by the THINGS they admire and coo over. There are some people who are massive consumers of environmental events.
When I finally got a copy of Hayes’s book, Radical Homemakers, I confess it wasn’t what I expected–rather than a serious, theoretically grounded critique of consumer culture, family life, and the structural obstacles that often stand in the way of adopting a simpler, more communal lifestyle, I found an often sloppily researched but nonetheless impassioned instruction manual-cum-rallying cry.
Few places in the U.S. are as well suited to developing renewable energy as the contaminated sites known as “brownfields.” But as communities from Philadelphia to California are discovering, government support is critical to enable solar and wind entrepreneurs to make use of these abandoned lands.
