Society

In a Time of Limits

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When the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the newly founded American republic in the early years of the nineteenth century, he encountered plenty of things that left him scratching his head. The national obsession with making money, the atrocious food, and the weird way that high culture found its way into the most isolated backwoods settings—“There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” he wrote; “I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin”—all intrigued him, and found their way into the pages of his remarkable book Democracy in America.

A not so common house

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I’ve recently moved into a new cohousing community, a few miles from Lancaster, where private homes mix with communal living. The heart of any cohousing community is its common house – a cross between a village hall, and a communal living/dining room; a space to help us deepen our connections with each other.

Ode to empathy

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With the emergence of a global civilization, we need to move beyond the “us and them” mentality that lends itself to so much conflict, violence, and self-destruction. An absolutely essential ingredient for this is empathy. Empathy is the act of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, as the vernacular goes.

Seattle-area architect leverages the power of the commons to foster stronger neighborhoods

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“I’m trying to bring the neighbor back into the neighborhood,” says Seattle-area architect Ross Chapin, author of a beautiful book called Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating a Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World. Chapin believes design has a strong influence on community connectivity, which is best developed when residents have contact with land held in common, especially in small, four- to twelve-household “pocket neighborhoods.”

Individual matters

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While environmental advocates urge individuals to reduce their carbon footprint by taking small, simple actions, others argue that individual actions are irrelevant. Do such actions have meaningful impact on the global systems that drive severe weather? Or is policy—corporate and government—the only thing that will make a real difference?

Surviving and Thriving: Successful models for sustainable recovery in Haiti

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Since Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, UUSC has partnered with the Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP) in the Central Plateau on pilot projects to support survivors, create sustainable rural livelihoods, and foster people’s control over their own food. Beyond initial relief work, UUSC has made a long-term commitment in Haiti, redefining recovery to include social justice. As part of these efforts, UUSC has championed two innovative MPP models: the eco-village and tire gardens. These models are bearing fruit — and vegetables, as the case may be — and UUSC is helping transform them from testing ground into template.

Two Books that Shed Light on Our Present Predicament: Arcadia and The Dog Stars

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There’s no shortage of modern writers who are exploring our modern dystopia by, as someone has put it in a different context, “remembering forward.” Recently, I happened to read two such novels back to back, both quite fine and both illustrative of that something in the zeitgeist that makes our grinding apocalypse worth writing about. Neither is a techy, sci fi, plot-driven novel such as those of William Gibson or Paolo Bacigalupi, nor are they fully akin to sociological horror stories such as 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale. They are less didactic than World Made by Hand or The Road.
 

So Much Magic

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In Extraenvironmentalist #56 we speak with James Howard Kunstler about his recent book, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. Jim talks about how the magnitude of corruption in our financial system revealed since 2008 has been even greater than he could have imagined.

Political Analysis – America In Revolt

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As the nation awaits President Obama’s State of the Union address, Sandy LeonVest hosts an inspiring program on the essential nature of activism in our (failing) democracy and what is rapidly becoming the second “American Revolution.” She’s joined in this endeavor by Move to Amend founder David Cobb, and human rights activist and single-payer advocate Dr. Margaret Flowers (Physicians for a National Health Program or PNHP).

Mutually assured well being: The continuity of community and individual resilience

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In the face of incessant climate-change related natural disasters, severe economic contraction, energy depletion, escalating violence, resource wars, and a burgeoning loss of civil liberties, many communities throughout the world are responding resiliently to the unprecedented challenges of our time in ways we could not have imagined even two or three decades ago. Relocalization movements, community land trusts, gift economies, cooperatives, tool libraries, community clothing swaps, and seed-lending libraries are but a few examples of building community resilience among people who have come to understand that the global economy and the consumerism that sustains it are rapidly descending into the dustbin of history.

Making the sustainability change

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It strikes me as very strange that we have known about climate change and the risks associated with it for many decades, yet individuals, politicians and business leaders are doing so little. With such overwhelming evidence, why do we find it so difficult to change? Change is perceived as hard. The unknown frightens us. We may be worse off than before, so why bother opening that door? But what if we changed our paradigm and open ourselves to a new realm of possibilities and potential?

Skin In The Game

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The old-fashioned school districts that provided me with a convenient example in last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report represent a mode of politics that nobody, but nobody, talks about in today’s America. Across the whole landscape of our contemporary political life, with remarkably few exceptions, when people talk about the relationship between the political sphere and the rest of life, the political sphere they have in mind consists of existing, centralized governmental systems.