Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The current economic downturn is the worst in decades. Millions are suffering devastating losses – vanishing jobs, foreclosed homes, and soaring food and health costs. In a world with fewer resources to go around, the future of environmentalism may hinge on making it synonymous with building sustainable, resilient communities that can meet everyone’s basic needs.
Not deterred by the international financial crisis which became widespread in 2008 or by the many recessionary patterns that grip most country economies, financial engineers are massing in København to prepare for the next wave. This one is about the commercial opportunities which renewable energy technologies, country climate funds and sectoral mitigation programmes promise to contain.
What I’d like to do for this post is ask if government policies contribute to the troubles in the food system. I see ways in which we are we working against our own interests, akin to a giant tug of war game, where the work of one only serves to counter the work of another.
You may remember recently Ted Trainer’s first draft of his paper “The Transition Towns Movement: its huge significance, and a friendly criticism”, and my subsequent response. Ted subsequently sent some more detailed thoughts, and has since rewritten his piece, which you can download here. Brian Davey of Transition Nottingham responded to Ted’s piece in a beautiful, heartfelt and fiery response, which he has kindly allowed me to share with you, as many of you might find that his key points resonate quite deeply. My thanks to both.
In October 2008, Deconstructing Dinner had the pleasure of spending time on Cortes Island, British Columbia with a group of young enthusiastic adults who had just spent 8 months learning the intricacies of growing food using organic and permaculture principles…On this episode we meet those students and instructors to learn more about this unique programme, its impacts on the students, and perhaps for us as listeners, can act as inspiration to develop similar programmes in our own communities.
With a long-time eye to declining energy resources, Bart Anderson envisions a very different society in five years. The former editor of Energy Bulletin.net offers advice for post-oil living: Understand the problem. Prepare psychologically for big shifts and the unexpected. Find your niche and get good at it. See what your great grandparents did as a model for living well within limits. “Live poor and learn to do it well” as Bart did as a graduate student. Things will be very different, he said, but we’ll make it through.
I’ve gottten literally dozens of emails begging me to weigh in on the East Anglia climate scandal, and for a while, I was reluctant to do so, because ultimately, paying attention to something so inane just gives it credibility. We’re back, again, to the old battles over climate change — attention to trivialities in the absence of the central issue.
A few people have been in touch to ask whether, in the light of the recent illegal hacking into UEA’s emails, and the proposition by climate deniers that some of the emails that have emerged prove climate change is a scam, Transition Network now intends to renounce the absurd notion of human-induced climate change. Of course not.
Randy Udall, Dr. Robert Costanza, Albert Bates, Richard Douthwaite, Stephanie Mills, Michael Brownlee, Megan Quinn Bachman, and Thomas Greco tackle peak oil, climate change, and monetary collapse at the Conference on Michigan’s Future: Energy, Economy and Environment 2009.
It is logical to speak of peak ego, since cheap oil gave rise to affluence which in turn gave rise to more separation, separation in the meaning that affluence has offered us NOT to need each other the way tribal communities in the past did. Instead we have a lifestyle that separates us from the inherent wisdom of interdependence. When we have reached the ultimate separation perhaps we have reached peak ego. How much more ego can we have before the level of ‘happiness’ runs out?
Peak Oil, Climate change and the Greater Depression will pose many challenges to our way of life but let’s get real, for a moment: Golden Hordes aren’t one of them. At least not now. Economic depression brings with it a host of serious problems, and I think you can say quite confidently, without being a chicken little, that most of the world is in a Greater Depression.
Unless and until we mobilize a mass movement to take down and transform the U.S. legal, political and economic systems upholding the fiction that corporations possess the same constitutional rights as individuals, along with other hallmarks of corporate power, it is fruitless to blame green consumers for the failure to spur large-scale meaningful change.
