Act: Inspiration

Albert Bates on peak oil, relocalisation and why the hippys were right all along

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What is so wonderful about Albert’s talk is the incredible story he tells about what can be achieved when people work together to make something happen. The story of hundreds of middle-class city hippy kids turning up on 1000 acres of poor farmland in Tennessee and having to work out how to grow food, build houses, make electricity and so on, is a great story for our times, showing what the combination of circumstance, passion and necessity can draw out of us.

Survival 101: They don’t teach that in most colleges, and there’s a dilemma

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Can a young person risk going to college these days?
If you’re 18 and college-bound, you may be skilled at computers and driving a car; know how to take the second derivative of a quadratic equation in calculus and have learned about electron orbits in chemistry; and may be able to discuss Shakespeare and “To Kill a Mockingbird” intelligently. But do you know how to kill and dress a chicken, or find and prepare wild edible plants in every season, or keep a goat healthy so it produces milk and meat?

“Plan C” Conference – survival strategies for the energy crisis – Oct 31-Nov 2

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ROCHESTER, Michigan – On Halloween weekend several hundred community activists, sustainability educators, and lifestyle change advocates will convene here at a three-day conference to learn about ways to cut their household energy use and create resilient, sustainable communities that will be able to weather the coming economic and ecological storms.

A teaching garden in our National Mall in Washington D.C.

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Recently, going through some old papers, I found the design for that long-lost garden. It never got built because in 1980, Ronald Reagan became President and appointed Earl Butz Secretary of Agriculture and that was the end of that. No money for organic research, and especially no “teaching garden” for the National Mall. Heaven forbid people learn that there’s an alternative to big chemical ag.