Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Klimaforum, the people’s conference, has started slowly. Maybe a 1000-2000 of us in many different locations feeling our way into perhaps the defining moment of our life and times which this conference represents and reflect the hopes an fears of our generation in a way that no other I have even been to does. There is a tension and an intensity that I have never felt before.
-Cultivating Resilience: The Shelburne Falls Food Security Plan
-think global : eat local
-The Local Price Premium
-Nitrous oxide concerns cloud future of biofuels
-Regreening Africa
-Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in a Global Marketplace
-Grow $700 of Food in 100 Square Feet!
-N.J.’s food pantries and politics: Hungry people need food– end of discussion
It seems the evil empire will keep chugging along, despite my wishes to the contrary. How long is anybody’s guess. And, despite my record of bad guessing, I’ll toss out some more guesses here.
Jan Lundberg moved to Portland a year ago because it seemed like the best place to pursue his intersecting passions for food security, peak oil, bicycles, and sailing. These passions will be coming to fruition later this month when the oil analyst’s brainchild, the Sail Transport Network, will launch into its first major, ongoing local venture.
Jared Diamond seems to have missed one of the central observations of his own _Collapse_ – that when societies actually avert collapse, the tend to do so with strong levels of prohibition and regulation. That is, Japan didn’t ask the gun manufacturers to self-regulate, they prohibited the use of guns entirely. The reason the Dominican Republic is so much better off than Haiti isn’t because people refined their logging practices, but because they restricted them.
-Wikipedia shows signs of stalling as number of volunteers falls sharply
-Car culture: Some snapshots
-The story of cap and trade
-Available Now! The 2 Disc Special Edition of ‘In Transition 1.0′!
-Christmas insanity unwrapped
-Copenhagen climate change conference: ‘Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation’
-The Physics of Copenhagen
-Earth More Sensitive to Carbon Dioxide Than Previously Thought
-Cap and Fade
-‘Climategate’ at centre stage as Copenhagen opens
I talk often with elderly relatives and neighbours from Missouri, Germany and Ireland. They all grew up in different worlds; a farm, an urban tenement, or the ruins of a bombed city. Ask them what has changed, though, and the answer is always the same: the ubiquitous presence of family and community.
-America Without a Middle Class — It’s Not As Far Away As You Might Think
-Living without money
-The Deep Surface: A Note on Edward Abbey and Wendell Berry
The language of revolution should be used as a last resort and against odds that can be beaten only with radical thought and action. It requires justification or, at the very least, explanation.
The subject of food waste is not sexy. Anyone faced with the statistic that we waste 40% of our food in America is almost certainly appalled – for a second or two. But they also probably stop thinking about it just a tiny second later, probably after a moment of thinking “not us, though.” And yet, it almost certainly is us.
So what might it look like when a local authority really gets Transition? Earlier this week I received a very excitable email from Cristiano Bottone, one of the movers behind Transition Italia, and the Transition of his own town, Monteveglio, near Bologna.
