Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
At many of the screenings of the movie, I’ve been asked “what to do” about the farm bill. Well, it is complicated, and many issues and opportunities to act will be coming up this year as we get closer to voting time (in 2012), but here’s something that’s already happening.
Spain’s people’s movement has finally awoken, la Puerta del Sol in Madrid is now the country’s Tahrir Square, and the ‘Arab Spring’ has been joined by what is now bracing to become a long ‘European Summer’.
CSE’s view is that wind power is a necessary part of the energy mix that is required to meet our carbon emission reduction targets and help tackle climate change. However, wind power is not appropriate everywhere, and we believe it is the duty of local communities themselves to decide where there is a place for it through engaging responsibly with the best available evidence, and through working together to assess their own locality.
So, if apocalyptic messages seems premature to us and we are unable readily to empathise with people we don’t know in far distant lands, what, short of enforced regulation or first-hand experience of impacts, could possibly mobilise us en masse to become sustainable?
We want a world as it should be: a world where people quit fouling their own nest, where money isn’t the only object, a world where people consider the planet we are leaving to our children.
“We’re not trying to mimic industrial production, but we are trying to find that scale halfway between hand-spinning your yarn and a football field-sized industrial spinning rack,” says Burgess. Not, in many ways, unlike artisan food production. “I’d love to see the food movement incorporate the fiber movement, because, whether it’s what we put in our body or what we put on our bodies, all of it comes from the same soil.”
Elites in both corporations and government are often quite good at running systems they create, and bad at looking beyond these systems at larger social effects.
“Why do you write about politics so much? Why so negative? Why not more stories on Permaculture?” are questions we sometimes get from readers on Transition Voice. And these are often followed by a statement that Transition is really about “positive actions in the local community.” I’m a fan of community canneries, local currencies and saving energy at City Hall. I’m just not ready yet to join Voltaire’s Candide in withdrawing from the world to cultivate my garden.
– Nation Down To Last Hundred Grown-Ups
– The Ecology of Magic: An Interview with David Abram
– Children growing weaker as computers replace outdoor activity
– How the Illusion of Being Observed Can Make You a Better Person
In pondering the reasons for this lack of progress—this potentially cataclysmic failure of progressive argument—I have come to a fairly radical view: that we can never have a sustainable civilization unless we first achieve sustainability as individuals. Billions of us (not just a few million) will need to embrace lower-consumption, more thoughtful, more ecologically conscious lifestyles with the same personal passion that is today wasted on free-market profiteering, religious proselytizing, or yearning for power and control of other humans. And if I had to identify the single most daunting barrier to that kind of embrace, it is our pervasive intellectual and emotional disconnection from the living planet we evolved on.
GNH (Gross National Happiness) attempts to balance economic development, environmental conservation, good governance, and cultural promotion. Bhutan’s first prime minister, Lyonchoen Jigme Y. Thinley, is now working to radically transform Bhutan’s national education system to reflect GNH values, which he defines as “sacredness, reverence, honour, and respect.”
Turn a century-old Seattle house into an efficient, energy-producing home using repurposed materials. Owner-builder Jim Bristow’s creativity extends to reclaiming dead spaces, jacketing his house with exterior insulation, and modernizing the kitchen with sleek previously used cabinetry and low-power LED lights. But he’s not stopping there. Along with maintaining a prolific front yard vegie garden, this green-minded guy is working with neighbors and the city to construct a storm water drainage and traffic circle at the nearby street intersection.
