Act: Inspiration

Review of Brenda Boardman’s Fixing Fuel Poverty

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Brenda Boardman continues to do pioneering work in the field of fuel poverty in Britain. She is Emeritus Fellow with the Lower Carbon Futures at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. Twenty years ago, Boardman wrote her landmark study, Fuel Poverty: From Cold Homes to Affordable Warmth, which provided the first quantifiable definition of fuel poverty (ie. when a household spends more than 10% of its income on energy services).

How fools progress

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There are days I wonder if I’m out of my depth homesteading. (I’m a new homesteader in rural Ontario. You can read what that’s looking like here.) So much of my natural occupation has been about documents and computers. I’m at home in that world and understand it. But here in DIY-land there’s so many parts I don’t know, so many systems Like the Fool, my friend in the tarot deck, I step out with unknown perils ahead.

Food: Growing community food systems

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Food systems can be a very powerful tool for resilience. In a revolutionary way, you can completely transform things without people realizing what’s happening–they are aware, but it just makes intuitive sense this way. It’s also not about just going out and fighting the proverbial "man," or continuing an academic dialogue about what could happen or should happen; you don’t have time for this because you’ve got a lot to do.

My foreword to ‘Local Sustainable Homes’

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Next week sees the publication of the next book in the Transition Books series, ‘Local Sustainable Homes: how to make them happen in your community’ by Chris Bird. More details to follow (including how to order your copy), but as a taster, here is my foreword to the book…

Why “green wizards” get us nowhere new…

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Transition Culture is back! After a month of Cornish beaches, hemp lime plastering, wood store-building, cinema visits, catching up with friends, storytelling festivals, campfires and wrestling with cabbage white caterpillars, normal service is resumed. Nice to see you again, you’re looking well. I’m kicking off again with some reflections on John Michael Greer’s “green wizardry” concept, which he calls “the current Archdruid Report project”, which will no doubt generate some interesting debate.

Peak Moment 178: Beyond back yard sustainability

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Four years ago (in episode 51, “An Experiment in Back Yard Sustainability”), Scott McGuire asked “how much food can I grow in my back yard to feed my family?” In this episode, we learn the results, and that food supply is not an individual project — it takes a community to feed one another. Scott’s garden later became a CSA (community-supported agriculture) for eight families.

How I came to the off-grid life

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I was searching for something different when I found the off-grid way of life, but I didn’t know what. I was a journalist, specializing in environmental stories. But this was in the 1990s and mainstream media had little or no time for subjects like pollution caused by factories, or the dangers of pesticides. “Why don’t you, just for once, bring us a story about a kidnapped baby, or something simple?” an embittered news editor once snarled as he spiked my carefully researched and potentially libellous article about pollution from a factory making a well-known brand of photographic film.

Home-grown businesses: The role of grassroots financing

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In the summer of 2008, business partners Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting were making plans to open a bookstore in Brooklyn. Their chosen neighborhood, Fort Greene, was over the moon at the prospect. For years, residents had been clamoring for a bookstore, repeatedly citing it as their top need in surveys conducted by the neighborhood association.

McMansions and chicken coups

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Interview with urban homesteader and somatic psychotherapist Rachel Kaplan in Petaluma, California. “For a typical urban permaculture project, a can do attitude is essential. A willingness to experiment, make mistakes, and keep trying. … you also need to have a willingness to challenge yourself on some things which are just not accepted in our culture–composting your own poop, for example–and living in a way that others might find odd, challenging, disrespectful, messy or intimidating. You have to care more about the world you want to live in than the world we live in now.”

The voyage of Kiri: Making sense of collapse

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Discussion: Perceptive readers have probably wondered about the strange mix of topics we’ve covered — ranging from floods and fisheries to tourism development and drug production. What is the relationship between these issues and their significance to this voyage’s “theme of exploring the effects of climate on Mexico’s coastline?” This might be a good opportunity for a bird’s-eye view, using island examples and past societies for perspective.