Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On social farms, health, social or specialist educational care services for vulnerable people are delivered through structured programmes of farming-related activities. Social farming is established in numerous European countries. Norway currently operates 1,100 social farms, compared to 240 in the UK.
Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet, published earlier this year, is a fabulous book. Not a perfect book; sometimes, in order to bulk up this two-pronged thesis, he will throw in supplementary material that threatens to bog down his central investigation. But that investigation comes through loud and clear all the same, and it is one worth looking at closely.
I see joyful militancy as both a practice and an articulation – ideally both together. As a practice it does not always come with an articulation of the experience, and then there are those groups and movements that have the explicit language of care and love, but do not always practice it.
You probably haven’t heard of the term acedia used, and it has several definitions, so I’ll start by defining it. It is a disillusioned detachment, disengagement or dissociation that stems from an incapacity to cope with the realities of the moment.
Resilience and the ability to survive will depend on our ability to embrace reality and begin now to prepare for the changes that are coming.
Education for social and ecological literacy will be an important catalyst in the process of creating a culture of sustainability. The challenges of climate change, approaching peak oil, and non-renewable resource depletion are creating the need for an education that empowers citizens through knowledge and skills which enable them to actively participate in the design and creation of sustainable communities and bioregions.
My advice for young adults everywhere is this: pick an issue you’re passionate about and volunteer. You’ll meet people who care about the same things, and more importantly, you’ll be DOING SOMETHING to make the world a better place.
As resources become scarce, A New Reality uses a pattern seen in nature – decelerating growth in the second part of the Sigmoid Curve – to display a shift that must happen in order for human kind to survive, referred to as Epoch B. In Epoch B, people recognize the limited nature of resources and human values adjust toward equilibrium, balance and consensus – interdependence.
People eventually came to see that the old system would not provide for them and that a satisfactory society had to be about mostly highly self-sufficient and self-governing local communities running their own affairs via highly participatory procedures in local economies that did not grow and that minimized resource use…
The Trump era will not last forever. How it will end we do not know, because how and when it ends is in part in our hands. Waiting for it to end is not a strategy. Working for it to end is…
Our history would be simple if we could classify it neatly into dominating alpha-males versus cooperative hunter-gatherers, but the experience of agency gives us not one but two fundamental impulses. As well as the desire not to be dominated it gives us the impulse to explore our individuality
A just recovery for Puerto Rico not only means rebuilding what Maria destroyed, but reclaiming the political and economic agency stifled by American colonialism.
