Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
David Gershon‘s book ‘Social Change 2.0′ has been one that quite a few people involved in Transition have found useful and insightful, so I was delighted to be able to have a conversation with him recently. My discussion with him will be spread over 2 posts, one today and the second part on Monday.
If we create and recreate the world everyday, then how has it become so supposedly absurd to believe we might actually create a world that is honestly making the possibilities of egalitarianism, justice and democracy?
The American Dream is a meme forged in the aftermath of World War II that embedded the promise of prosperity, success and upwards mobility into the country’s cultural lexicon. It seems this Dream is coming to an end, leading many to wonder what comes next. This essay articulates a more realistic vision of how the world works as well as how rites of passage can lead people towards a worldview that will serve them well in years to come.
It’s no accident that the 1960 film adaptation of The Time Machine opens with host HG Wells welcoming four friends to a dinner party in London on January 5, 1900 to recount events that had occurred since he last met them, on New Year’s Eve, 1899.
A recent academic study in Cambridge looked to see whether learnings from the success of Silicon-Fen (which lead to companies such as ARM and Autonomy) could be transferred to create Eco-Fen, making Cambridge a sustainable city through new technologies and practices that could be transferable elsewhere.
KMO welcomes Kathy McMahon, the Peak Shrink of PeakOilBlues.com, back to the C-Realm to talk about the psychology of predictions…You may be braced for a sudden, sexy collapse, but do you have the gumption to endure the sucky collapse?
The hard work of rebuilding a post-imperial America, as I suggested in last week’s post, is going to require the recovery or reinvention of many of the things this nation chucked into the dumpster with whoops of glee as it took off running in pursuit of its imperial ambitions. The basic skills of democratic process are among the things on that list; so, as I suggested last month, are the even more basic skills of learning and thinking that undergird the practice of democracy.
Many of our streets haven’t changed in decades, even when they’ve proven dangerous, or the surrounding communities’ needs have changed. When the roads have been altered, they have often been made wider, straighter, and faster, rather than more livable. Our Rightsizing Streets Guide aims to help planners and community members update their streets to make them ‘right’ for their context.
Many urban transportation historians point to Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s successful campaign to rid New York City and its boroughs of the streetcar as one of the key turning points in crippling public transportation across the country. It set a trend that made eschewing streetcars a trendy thing to do. He was heard to comment that streetcars were as obsolete as the sailing ship, perhaps reflecting his drive to banish any “relics” from the city that reminded him of the “old country” (LaGuardia was an immigrant himself). Well, sixty-five years after the demise of the last streetcar in New York City, I can confidently report the that streetcar (and its similarly healthy big brother, light rail) are doing just fine.
It’s early January and I’m sitting in the Green Dragon pub at Sustainable Bungay’s first event of the year, a Green Drinks session on the theme of Well-Being and the Community. The room is packed, the discussion is lively, and a new Arts, Culture and Well-Being group is formed with monthly events already being planned and put into diaries. Everything from mapping the areas in town where people experience well-being (or not), to teaching each other skills in communications, living together, growing food, meditation and even body drumming (I’m going to have a go at that one).
“The external growth of a budding economy is over. The focus on growth now needs to be on the inner world.” Carolyn Baker’s Navigating the Coming Chaos is a toolkit to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the collapse of industrial civilization now underway. First build an “internal bunker,” she suggests, to begin healing the fear, grief and despair that immobilize many people in our “culture of numbness.” From that foundation, she invites us to look at who our allies are — people, places, possessions. Carolyn observes that many people experience a level of joy by doing this work (Episode 225).
The main talent of Martin Luther King Jr., among many, was an ability to lift into wide awareness brutality and unfairness that a majority had been willing to ignore. The struggle for racial justice is not over (for example, the same Supreme Court that proclaimed the personhood of corporations is about to consider a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965). But MLK helped lead the way to notable success.
