Act: Inspiration

What does it matter?

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When protest is successful, on those rare and remarkable and wondrous occasions when resistance is possible, it is successful not because of the pure, clear political persistence of actors who carry signs or passively protest or fight legal battles. Instead, it is successful because political protest is chained not to doors or trees but to the emergence of a new way of life. This way of life is not perfect or sufficient, but the overwhelming emergence of something new and different in ordinary and daily ways is a hallmark of almost every successful political protest.

What lies at the core of Pattern Language, and why should we care?

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Many individuals involved with Transition, including Rob Hopkins, have become fascinated with the work of Christopher Alexander and his development of pattern language. [He noticed] that any built environment is like a language in that the patterns communicate problems we confront in our environments but also contain within them the solutions. … Often overlooked is what Alexander calls the “luminous ground” on which the pattern language theory is built.

Dr. Gabor Maté on the stress-disease connection, addiction, attention deficit disorder and the destruction of American childhood

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Interview with the Canadian physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté: “The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another.

Top 10 peak oil books of 2010

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Having read enough books with Hubbert curves and charts of barrels-per-day to last us until the second Bristol Palin administration, we’re now into powerful stories that explore peak oil through suspense, romance and humanity. But so you won’t feel guilty having so much fun at the expense of the whole premise of industrial civilization, we’ve thrown in some more fact-y tomes too. Peak oil stalwarts from James Howard Kunstler to Richard Heinberg to Robert Hirsch made the list along with some surprising newcomers.

Advice to students: understand money, localize

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A coal industry CEO told students at a small Quaker boarding high school to prepare for jobs in coal mines and power plants, rather than study philosophy or become community organizers….He preached high technology as the answer to humanity’s energy woes—technology created and owned by large multi-national corporations, which are designed to amass enormous monetary and physical wealth by exploiting natural resources and human labor.

The techno-fantasies of Evo Morales: the consequences of modernization

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The truth about Bolivia’s flurry of noveau-tech modernization is that, while such a pursuit may have appeared to be the means toward sustainability and defense for an island like Cuba, under attack by the world’s most potent nation-state in the 1960s — today’s ecologists, environmentalists, social-movement activists, and traditional peoples assert that exploitation/expansion-based development can no longer be the way up and out.

Not arks or fortresses but Cities of Light

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We have a natural desire to find a way that we and our loved ones can be “safe” in the midst of the upcoming Peak Oil, Economic Collapse, and Climate Change cataclysms. This leads us to think of Arks or Fortresses, which simply won’t work. What then is a model for the coming times? The only model that can work is the decidedly unsafe and generous City of Light.

Twilight of the chicken tenders

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The current American food system can be expected to unravel as the limits to growth begin closing in. Somewhere between the gourmet notions that dominate too much of today’s “slow food” and the mass-produced product that passes for fast food, a new incarnation of traditional working class cuisine is waiting to be born.