Muddling Through and Unsung Heroes
Our future will involve a lot of just "muddling through" as our complex society starts to fall apart, and we must stay away from the "strong men" who will offer appealingly simple answers to complex problems.
Society
Crash on Demand: Energy Descent Scenarios
Many climate policy professionals and climate activists are now reassessing whether there is anything more they can do to help prevent the global catastrophe that climate change appears to be.
Carless cities and sky cycles
•Hamburg’s Plan to Eliminate Cars in 20 Years •The Ridiculous Sky Cycle by Norman Foster •We Need to Design Parking Garages With a Car-less Future in Mind •It’s not the economy, stupid; young people really are turning their backs on cars •The Rise (and All-Around Awesomeness) of Open Streets
“We Must Care About our Public Spaces”
(We) must care about our public spaces to help encourage others to care about them too.
Return of the Space Bats
Most of what’s kept people in today’s industrial world from coming to grips with the shape and scale of our predicament is precisely the inability to imagine a future that’s actually different from the present.
Sharing: Direct Action for the new economy
The system is clearly broken and the game needs to be changed: We need a new blueprint for the economy and a new infrastructure and culture to support it.
Edge Dwelling: A Social Ecology For Our Time, Part 2: Wild Grapes
“If everyone disenchanted with this culture decided to wander off into the lonesome wilderness, it would have absolutely no effect on its workings,” writes Miles Olson, in his book Unlearn-Rewild.
Public art unites the community
Public art is one of those things that’s more than the sum of its parts. Here in my neighborhood, the humble traffic signal box—a four-foot-tall aluminum cabinet that had never before registered on my radar—seems to be the start of something big.
Agency on Demand? Holmgren, Hopkins, and the Historical Problem of Agency
All these questions are questions of agency: to what extent, if any, can humans be purposeful agents of historical change. This question, I will suggest, has up to now been given something like a free pass in much post-carbon discourse, for reasons that I will explain in depth later.
Co-operatives need to embrace a new kind of governance
Much co-operative governance tries to wrestle with two roles: that the people making strategic calls are elected by members and that those people in the boardroom have the ability to ‘hold management to account’ for how they perform their role as stewards of members’ assets.
The street where no one opens the door
I just wanted to bake some cookies. And then things got a little crazy.
Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future
Permaculture teaching and activism have always aimed to work with those already interested in changing their lives, land and communities for the better, rather than proselytising the disinterested majority.
