Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Take a personal tour with members of Santa Barbara City College’s Student Sustainability Coalition. They’re propelling action — like bringing fresh, local organic produce daily to the salad bar, and placing recycling bins in the cafeteria.
When there is no money for fuel in the middle of winter, desperate residents have on occasion resorted to burning the furniture. That works as long as the furniture lasts. But come spring, there may be no place to sit or sleep, and no prospect of resorting to the same practice should a heating emergency arise the following winter. Yet, this is more or less the equivalent of what many states and municipalities are doing in the face of our unprecedented financial crisis.
Resistance to changing the culture we now possess (or possesses us?), a culture that is arguably fatally destructive to the biosphere, includes the argument that we can’t go back to the way we used to live 100 years ago or some other harsher time where we tied our shoes, cleaned floors with mops, and (God forbid) churned butter.
The least popular of the laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics — better known as the law of entropy — is also the key to understanding the problems with modern economics. There’s an inevitable mismatch between the production of goods and services, which are subject to entropy, and the production of money through interest, which in theory drives infinite growth — but this mismatch is resolved in an unexpected way.
it’s the end of the world as we know it (…and I feel fine) (1)
Probably few saw this meltdown coming. We have come to view human progress as a given, and an ever growing economy and living standard as an entitlement.
New York state author, blogger, and homesteader Sharon Astyk discusses her new book, A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil. Astyk sees the energy shortages of peak oil hitting us and our food system now, and she argues that US food security depends on 100 million of us starting to farm in the near future. Four Vermonters also describe part of what they are doing to move Vermont toward much stronger local food systems.
-Urban Farming ‘Mushrooms’ During Recession
-Season Extension Techniques: Cheap and Dirty Options
-Finding fulfilment through farming
In his famous work “The Waking.” Michigan poet, Theodore Roethke, offered sage advice for navigating unprecedented transitions and cultivating resilience. Wisely, the Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins establishes three domains for people who are awake to these transitions as they endeavor to journey through them into a post-industrial world.
To say that our collective human fate lies somewhere between complete destruction and an endless cornucopian future is yet another narrative. Even so, such a narrative requires something the other two do not, creative engagement with the still unfathomable universe. That may be the one thing that emphatically recommends it above the alternatives.
Authenticity comes when your thoughts, your words, and your deeds have some relation to each other. It comes when there’s a real organic relationship between the way you think, the way you talk, and the way you act. You have to fight for authenticity all the time in this world, and if you don’t fight for it you will get derailed. But when you have it, when you feel that surge of recognition—that I’m saying exactly what I’m thinking, and I’m ready to do something about it—well, that’s an intellectual and emotional orgasm that makes sex look like nothing.
Diana Leafe Christian, author of Finding Community: How to join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community, zeros in on how to find an ecovillage. Bob Banner, publisher of Hopedance magazine, shares insights from Andrew Harvey’s Sacred Activism workshop: “What breaks your heart, what you really love, is the thing that will sustain you…
