Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
How important do you think humans are? For millennia we have been taught that human beings have a vital almost divine role in the Great Chain of Being, and to look around the cities where most of us now live you could indeed be forgiven for thinking that we are ecologically dominant, if not vital to the functioning of life on Earth: I think it’s about time this was put into some kind of perspective.
I am going to make an argument I don’t see much. Reading the pros and cons on this subject is a bit like watching a pea roll around on a plate. My goal is to stick a fork in that pea and focus on something very fundamental. The point I will make is that one can say with high confidence bordering on certainty that only a predominantly local food system will ever be sustainable.
It’s getting more and more onerous for me to interface with the dominant culture. Delusion is the water in which we swim. You can see it everywhere and anywhere and elsewhere and right here, well-documented and critiqued in Guy McPherson’s recent blog, Scale, and in Keith Farnish’s latest at Culture Change, Time to Decide What Matters. The depths of our cultural insanity astound.
But that’s the easy part, seeing the delusion around us.
-Generation Why
-Greenpunk
-Colorado: Preparing For Winter
-The Zero Growth Mind
-The Peasantry of the Future
-The Virtues of Deglobalization: Has the time finally come to reverse and end globalization?
Biting into a fresh-baked cookie from “Baked in Telluride” is a double treat — a yummy goody that also supports a local independent business. Owner Jerry Green has been going “green” for decades before it became fashionable. He shares the challenges of running an independent business in a tourist town while competing with bakeries thousands of miles away. While a town councilor, Jerry helped shape projects like affordable public housing and public transportation.
Ecopsychologist Sarah Edwards, PhD, explains stages people often go through when facing the implications of climate change and resource depletion. She outlines various aspects of Denial, Anxiety, Awakening, Despair, Powerlessness and eventual Acceptance. Differentiating these from the normal grief process, Sarah emphasizes how we can face inevitable feelings of grief and free our energy for positive, practical action in our personal and community lives. (http://eco-anxiety.blogspot.com)
-Transition Towns project helps kick oil addiction
-Cuban Ambassador visits Cloughjordan
-In a small patch of land, hope reborn for Sudanese refugees
-Community Supported Agriculture thrives around Osceola, Wis.
-Celebrating the abundant growth of the farmers market
-Algae biofuel propels a braves’ new world
-Transition towns
-Wanderlusting No. 4: Copenhagen Cycle Culture
-Zipcar – The best new idea in business
-A Hitch For Rail Riders: Getting To Final Destination
-The Transition Towns Movement; its huge significance and a friendly criticism
-Responding to Ted Trainer’s Friendly Criticism of Transition
Low cost health care, or rather medical care as it really is constituted, is not a benefit if healing is not the purpose. “Getting better” perhaps — through treatments purchased — is what’s hoped for, even for the rich. In their case, life is sometimes extended through great expense, but is it worth living hooked up to machines? Democracy has come to mean the poor too are on multiple legal drugs, with side-effects requiring still more drugs.
Within the span of a couple generations, we abandoned a durable, finely textured, life-affirming set of living arrangements characterized by self-sufficient family farms intermixed with small towns that provided commerce, services, and culture. Worse yet, we traded that model for a coarse-scaled arrangement wholly dependent on ready access to cheap fossil fuels.
