Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What is Retail Supported Agriculture? As far as the North American local food movement is concerned, it’s not a concept that has yet been coined in any notable way. The Kootenay Grain CSA (community supported agriculture) project located in the Kootenay region of British Columbia is now changing that.
Former oil and gas analyst Jan Lundberg says declining energy and climate ends globalization. It’s time to launch the lifeboats of localization and sustainable energy. Why big government can’t fix it — and why do we need big government at all? Lundberg sees an inevitable rebuild from his website culturechange.org.
The Mondragón Cooperative Corporation (MCC), the largest consortium of worker-owned companies, has developed a different way of doing business—a way that puts workers, not shareholders, first.
A common refrain today is how ‘the government’ needs to do something; the openly voiced belief that those in authority hold all the power, while the ‘common folk’ are merely cogs who have no strength to change anything…It is the power of people – not ‘the’ people, merely people in general, as a whole, who are willing to stand up in defiance of this short-sighted and greedy behavior. It is their courage in the face of an oppressive, world-straddling civilization, one built upon exploiting the poorest to benefit the richest, that now stands as the battlefield in the age-old struggle between the kingmakers and the common folk.
From the STTP website: In the next few months, Truth to Power will be featuring interviews with individuals who are consciously transitioning to a post-carbon lifestyle…Everyone’s story of preparation is different; there is no one-size-fits-all model. This series of interviews with real people preparing for collapse will honor the uniqueness of those individuals and the methods of preparation that serve them in their particular situations.
-Man-made eruptions – ‘Plan B’ in the battle for the planet
-We’re pumping out CO2 to the point of no return. It’s time to alter course
-Climate Camp set up in the footsteps of the Peasants’ Revolt
-Big stores counting the cost of ban on GM food
-Climate tipping point defined for US crop yields
-The promise and limits of local food
-Organic Farmers Seek Healthier Future
-U.S. farmers warm to community agriculture model
On my lap, I’ve got a set of school books that date from the 1850s to the 1890s. They belonged to various of my father’s family – my great-uncle, George Hume, who died long before I was born and studied Eaton’s Common School Arithmetic in Amesbury, MA in the late 19th century, not 20 miles from where I would go to school 100 years later.
The end of oil is closer than we thought. An industry expert tells us we’re in for 40 years of bad road.
So we’ll visit the oil-free alternative called “Transition Town”, a community of high-energy people experimenting with a low-energy lifestyle in England.
The next case of $120 oil, assuming we get there before the industrial economy falls into the abyss, will be brutal for an already over-stretched American consumer. Banks are falling like dominoes on a mule cart over the bumpy terrain of declining energy supplies. When will the lights go out?
As someone who has spent the past quarter of his life in the lower latitudes, the fancy footwork and the tropical rhythms still present a bit of a challenge on the dance floor. All the same, when I see my peak oil-aware brethren struggling to define and implement the best way to achieve a lower carbon future, I feel a bit of confidence that in this corner of the world, we are a couple of steps ahead of our temperate climate cousins. At times the contrasts are striking, at times comic.
The recent debate between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth over whether we actually can save the world seems mostly to have degenerated into sound and fury, which is rather a problem, since the larger question of whether climate change is stoppable, whether we can avoid having billions of people die, seems, well rather a good one.
