Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In your widely publicized May 2010 letter to Bill McKibben, you ask for specific strategies to achieve a global CO2 reduction down to 350ppm. Here’s how, from the United States arm of the international Transition movement:
No mass media is as pervasive or intrusive as the American one. Now that we’ve stopped making stuff, more or less, we’re still super prolific at selling our own image. This hypnosis works even on Americans, who should know better. But we don’t live here so much as inside media. The average American watches four hours of television a day, listens to constant music, and there’s also the internet with its Facebook, texting, twitter and email, etc, to distract him.
The 2010 Transition Network conference is fast upon us (June 12-14th, Seale Hayne Agricultural College, Devon).
Most discussion on transportation alternatives to single-occupant fossil fuel-powered vehicles focuses on moving people from place to place. Options might include electric trains, walking, and bicycling. But also important for functioning cities is moving goods around, and most of the above options would seem to have severe limitations when one considers the variety of things that need to be moved. How does one carry a sheet of plywood across town? Surely not on a crowded subway. But a recent trip to China demonstrated for me that almost anything is possible.
-Peak Relationships: the end of suburbia up close and personal
-I share their despair, but I’m not quite ready to climb the Dark Mountain
-The End of Thatcherism
I was out of town when Zuska posted this piece about trying to feed a family on a food stamp budget, and I’ve been meaning to respond to her suggestion that I might have something to add for a while. The article she builds on is one in which chefs try and come up with food stamp budget menus that are also healthy and appealing.
When BP’s Deep Water Horizon well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, it was difficult to imagine the scope of its impact on the delicate coastlines of Louisiana and adjacent states. Today, the former platform site continues to spill about 5,000 barrels a day – or 210,000 gallons – into the Gulf, with no containment strategy yet in sight.
Over the past month, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (the CFIA) has embarked on a concentrated effort in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia, threatening area businesses with fines unless they remove their ungraded farm-fresh eggs from store shelves. Close to a dozen businesses that Deconstructing Dinner is aware of have received such a visit. This episode hears from a number of those businesses including comments on the issue from the BC Egg Marketing Board, the CFIA and the regional health authority Interior Health.
As a small girl, Enei Begaye knew to be quiet when visiting friends’ houses. Nearly everyone in the 4,900-person town of Kayenta, Arizona, part of the Navajo Nation, worked in the area’s coal mines, Black Mesa and Kayenta, which operated twenty-four hours a day. Begaye and her friends would play quietly so they wouldn’t disturb sleeping elders back from the night shift.
I plant weeds sometimes. I just feel I should admit this upfront, and come out with it and accept your outrage. You see, my property isn’t exactly untouched – it was a sod farm at one point (although most of the actual sod harvesting was done across the road on a field that is not mine), which means that for about decade from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, people poured incredibly toxic chemicals on the ground to keep the grass uniform and then dug up the topsoil and sold it rich people who couldn’t wait long enough for grass to grow.
Take a tour, accompanied by curious sheep and geese, of Mark Cooper’s self-sufficient small farm. Over several years, he transformed a rundown house and hillsides of berry brambles into pasture and gardens where he produces and preserves most of his family’s food. Visit the Goose Grotto in a constructed pond, a heritage fruit tree orchard, logs producing shiitake mushrooms, and a cheap-and-easy container kitchen garden…This farmstead in Rough and Ready (CA) lives up to the town’s name — and is a testament to hard work, wide-ranging construction skills, and love.
South Asians are seeing more work on the ground and hearing more policy announcements about urban development than ever before. For many who live in and around towns and cities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India (where South Asia’s biggest cities lie) this could be a good thing. The trouble is: national governments and planning authorities in Dhaka, Islamabad and New Delhi are tending more and more to follow a single ideology – economic growth will drive down poverty – and a primary route to that misplaced objective, which is greater urbanisation.
