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Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-On Small Farms, Hoof Power Returns
-Bringing Sustainability Home
-Upcycling: 2011’s greenest decorating trend
-Brixton Windmill reopens after restoration
-EU unveils plans to pay fishermen to catch plastic
-National Trust’s Wimpole Home Farm seeks online farmers
All empires are threatened by real joy. The empire does not want to change, it wants to hold on to its power, its monolithic marketplaces. It is terrified to experience its own ugliness and lack of heart, its human vulnerability.
The key question is, "Where in our current educational system is it possible to develop an institutionalize the kinds of education needed to prepare people for work in the post-carbon economy-and to do so relatively quickly?"
Take stock of your conversation skills. Our competitiveness has bled into our conversation. We compete for attention, trying to turn the conversation to ourselves rather than listening to the other person. Some dominate, hogging most of the air space. Others argue, wanting to impress, rather than just connecting as friends and equals.
We must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too likely risk the lives of places and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification ever for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it.
We discuss the state of the economy in Detroit, “ground zero” for the economic downturn in the United States, with civil rights activist and author, Grace Lee Boggs. “I think it’s very difficult for someone who doesn’t live in Detroit to say you can look at a vacant lot and, instead of seeing devastation, see hope,” says Boggs, “see the opportunity to grow your own food, see an opportunity to give young people a sense of process, that’s very difficult in the city, that the vacant lot represents the possibilities for a cultural revolution.”
-The Lost World
-Peak Psychotherapy, Abundant Human Connection
-Delivering Educational Products: The Job Formerly Known as Teaching
-A National Security Strategy That Doesn’t Focus on Threats
Blue Hill became the third town in Maine to adopt the Local Food and Self-Governance Ordinance. The Ordinance asserts that towns can determine their own food and farming policies locally, and exempts direct food sales from state and federal license and inspection requirements.
The practices of satoyama and satoumi refer to traditional Japanese land-management methods in inland (satoyama) and coastal (satoumi) areas. The concepts, which comprise not just agricultural techniques but entire socio-ecological systems, have provided in the past for sustainable, high-biodiversity areas that produce a range of “ecosystem services” — from timber, rice and fish to energy (biomass and hydropower for instance) and tourism. Although not quantifiable in purely economic terms, the concepts have provided residents and visitors with significant cultural and social benefits.
Money isn’t a neutral thing. The decisions we make with our investment choices either prop up and reinforce an economic model rooted in a past of cheap energy prices and climate irresponsibility, or they can help to bring forth a new, revitalised and more appropriate way of doing things.
Agriculture’s role in a country like Iraq goes beyond food production: it’s the second-largest sector in the Iraqi economy, a major source of rural employment, and a vital cultural signifier. As the rest of Iraq joins the Kurdish region in enjoying greater stability, the inevitable expansion of industrial agriculture paradoxically threatens to undermine the local communities that depend on agriculture for their way of life.
Articles from last month that we found fresh or significant.
Articles on economic contraction, the ghost of ASPO-9 (climate change), the PUBLIC Library.
Plus: peak oil on Australian TV, Bathtubs: A theory of community relations, UK’s happiness movement, building a mass climate movement, sustainable ideas from religion, Octogenarian recalls the First Great Depression.
