Act: Inspiration

Thanksgiving: a time to think about gift economies?

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If our current system fails us, we should have at least some idea regarding what options might be available that could perhaps be pieced together into a new system that works. As I looked at gift economies a bit, I realized our current system has a substantial element of gift economics in it. Perhaps if our already functioning gift economy can be expanded, it may play a role in transitioning to a more suitable long-term economy. … An important difference between a gift economy and an exchange economy is that in a gift economy, a bond develops between the gift giver and the recipient, while in an exchange economy, the parties often don’t care if they ever see each other again.

Thinking Thanksgiving II: Cycles

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If you want to make a traditional Thanksgiving dinner wholly from scratch, you start ahead of time. If you want to make it from food you’ve raised yourself, you start way, way ahead of time – like in January of the year before. In some ways, it starts even earlier, but January is the new year – and when you grow your own, you are always thinking of the future – even if not consciously about any particular dinner.

You are who you eat with

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When the 10 Garcia-Prats boys got together every night for dinner, they shared more than food around the table. They talked about the successes and frustrations of their days. The older boys helped the younger ones cut their meat. They compared their picks for the World Cup, a conversation that turned into an impromptu geography lesson.

Can energy retrofit loans bring wonderful life to economy?

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America is beginning to look a lot like the dark “Pottersville” vision in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Jimmy Stewart’s character George Bailey is shown a town where the middle class has been destroyed and lives in poverty under the thumb of evil Big Banker Henry Potter. Bailey’s heroic efforts to help the middle class saved Bedford Falls. America can help the middle class prepare for energy shortages with energy retrofit loans — or funnel billions to Potter-like promoters of Too Big to Fail energy projects. Where’s that angel Clarence when we need him most?

Peak Oil: Apocalypse or Promised Land?

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If we can’t honestly admit that staying the course means slamming into a brick wall at high-speed before the wreckage sails over a very high cliff we won’t make the necessary changes to do any more than stave off the inevitable–at best. The reality of the global situation today is that if you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention.

Deconstructing Dinner: Exploring Ethnobiology IV: (The immaterial components of food sovereignty)

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Exploring Ethnobiology is a new series Deconstructing Dinner has been airing since June. With seemingly more and more people becoming interested in developing closer relationships with our surroundings (our food, the earth), there’s much we can all learn from ethnobiologists, and in particular, from the symbiotic human-earth relationships that so many peoples around the world have long maintained. In the first half of the episode, we listen in on some of that discussion and in the second half, we listen to Associate Professor at Cornell University’s Department of Horticulture, Jane Mt. Pleasant, whose research has involved a fascinating comparative look into 17th/18th century cereal grain farming between the Iroquois people of what is now upstate New York and early European colonizers.

Peak Moment: ¿Cuánta comida puedo cultivar en mi casa?

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Uno de los mejores y más inspiradores capítulos de Peak Moment. En esta ocasión, Janaia Donaldson entrevista a Judy Alexandre, una mujer que ha convertido su jardín, y parte del de su vecino, en una auténtica mina de producción de alimentos. Descubre su ingenioso sistema para recoger y canalizar el agua de lluvia y conoce a sus abejas, lombrices y gallinas. Un verdadero Ejemplo Alternativo.

If I were a billionaire…

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If I were a billionaire, I wouldn’t believe what I’m about to write. Firstly, because my training, and especially my experience of getting richer in a growth based economy would have taught me that these ‘perfect storms’ when resource/financial bottlenecks supposedly loomed, historically worked out to be opportunities that spiked my digital wealth and incremental social power. Secondly, if I were a billionaire I wouldn’t believe what I’m about to write because all my peers, advisors and friends would tell me that it’s caca. And lastly I wouldn’t believe what I’m about to write as the implications would be too threatening, at least on the surface, to comprehend let alone integrate into my world view. All the same, if I were a billionaire, based on my understanding of our particular juncture of history, likely on the verge of transitioning away from marker claims back to real capital, here is what I would do….

Thinking Thanksgiving I: Turkey in the straw

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The centerpiece of any homegrown Thanksgiving meal, assuming you are not a vegetarian, is inevitably the homegrown turkey. And there are a lot of good reasons to get a local turkey or raise your own – there’s the flavor which is richer and deeper, an essence of turkey thing, there’s the fact that you know what went into it. And there’s the fact that by raising older breeds of turkeys, you actually preserve their future by eating them – honestly, there is no retirement home for elderly turkeys, and no one keeps them as pets. The future of the Blue Slate and the Standard Bronze depends heavily on their future as meat animals – and the extinction of a breed of livestock is a tragedy.