Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Today I want to discuss my contention that most of the writers named above, whom I have a great deal of respect for, seem to me to be missing the nuance of David Holmgren’s thinking. These deficient interpretations then are stretched and amplified as they bounce off one another in the blogosphere.
As part of our month’s exploration of the theme of ‘scaling up’, I recently visited Ottery St. Mary in East Devon to see Kevin McCabe, his wife Rose, and the extraordinary new cob house he has spent the last 3 years building.
The treatment of animals, and nature in general, is very different between our modern societies and the remaining indigenous one. We moderns have a lot to learn from the indigenous peoples, and science is tending to agree with them.
There has been a lot of reaction in recent days to David Holmgren’s recent reassessment of his Future Scenarios paper of 2007. In that paper, Holmgren describes four alternative scenarios, calling them Brown Tech, Green Tech, Earth Steward and Lifeboats.
Seven technological suites that can be sustained on a very limited resource base, produce goods or services of value even under dark age conditions, and could contribute mightily to the process of rebuilding if they get through the next five centuries or so.
Over the next 2 days we’ll be looking at 2 aspects of earth construction, cob and clay plasters, and their potential for scaling up.
For all the value of knowledge, it is of no use without the courage to face difficult realities.
A ferment in the environmental movement, brewing for many years, has now bubbled up into the blogosphere. We are dipping our ladle in here to take a little taste of it, even though we are quite certain it is not done fermenting.
One of the most important questions of my life three years ago was, “How can we start a movement for sharing?”
University of Minnesota undergrad Daniel Crawford illustrates climate change with his cello.
The greatest problem we have is that we can’t imagine any alternative. And that is the challenge: to invent, create and think as if we were living just after the collapse, if there is a collapse of capitalism, and how we will organize.
Only when we accept that we have a rather limited understanding of the world we live in are we able to act in ways that are prudent for ourselves and our communities and respectful of the Earth and of our fellow beings, human and otherwise.
