College: the ivory tower crumbles
Warning: This article is blasphemous. How can a former professor of history and psychology write an article with this title? Is the author simply a disgruntled doomer who has become hopelessly cynical?
Act: Inspiration
Michelle Long: How locally owned businesses are starting to change the world
Michelle Long, executive director of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), explains how BALLE communities are using locally owned businesses to create a safe space outside the dominant system for the next economy to develop. She spoke at Shelburne Farms on June 11 at the Inspired by Slow Money conference.
The CSIRO and the myth of progress
Busting the myth of progress is a precursor to changing industrial civilisations’ current unsustainable path.
Celebrating independence
On this Independence Day, I’m celebrating the ways my family’s lifestyle is becoming more independent from the mainstream. This means our lifestyle is becoming more independent from oil for long-distance transport of goods, more independent from carbon emissions, more independent from the Industrial Growth Paradigm, demanding less earth resources, and thus much more resilient.
Gross National Happiness – our part as individuals
We need public policies that help people become happier — things like national health care, social security, and shorter work hours. But we also need to discover things we can do as individuals
Myths from the right about the disaster in the gulf
A new narrative reverberating in right-wing political circles blames the Deepwater Horizon disaster on a favorite scapegoat: the federal government.
Giving care
For a whole host of reasons – demographic, economic, energy-linked and environmental, giving care is going to be a more important job in the future. More of us will have to care for one another, where institutions could once do so. More of us will have to rely on people we know, rather than our savings. More of us face the terrible fragility of those questions – who will care for me, how will I manage to care for them?
Back to our roots
Last September I attended the Prairie Festival at The Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas. At the institute, Wes Jackson and his colleagues are undertaking one of the most important agricultural research projects in the world. They have gone back to first principles and are breeding new grain crops that are perennials rather than annuals…They have taken the long view.
Our “end of the economy” moment
This past week at the Transition Network Conference 2010 in the UK, the speaker Stoneleigh rocked everyone’s paradigm with her talk “Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil”.
If thou wouldst what true freedom is thou shalt see it lies in… take the Big Society in good faith
On the morning of the 18th of May, the prime minister and deputy prime minister held a meeting in the cabinet room of 10 Downing Street. This event – occurring as it did on the morning before Parliament re-assembled following a government-changing election – brought together state and community leaders to discuss the new coalition’s Big Society programme.
Why sociopaths win & why, no, you don’t want to be one of them
But here’s what I really want to say, as a psychologist, to all of you: Sociopaths lack something 95% of us have: They lack a conscience. They lack the capacity to feel empathy, to feel guilt, to feel bad about doing bad. When you lack Vitamin E(mpathy), you hate people who have it. You walk around with an expensive suit and you have a black card to pay for an expensive dinner, and you buy and sell people and marry the hottest mates around, but it’s all for nothing. You can’t attach to other people, even though you know it is something you should want to do.
Declaration adopted by the Ecojustice People’s Movement Assembly at the US Social Forum, in Detroit, June 2010
We support the conclusion that only by “living well,” in harmony with each other and with Mother Earth, rather than “living better,” based on an economic system of unlimited growth, dominance and exploitation, will the people of this planet not only survive but thrive.
