Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Setting aside the discussion of international conflict, what will be the options of nations for dealing internally with economic decline? So far, the first resort of many countries has been fiscal austerity.
As our daily lives are becoming increasingly destabilized by financial recession, climate change and perhaps political marginalization, self-organizing communities are also becoming a steady presence, from co-ops and community gardens to large-scale political movements like Occupy and the Arab Spring.
After describing the Dancing Rabbit community as it appeared to us visitors, I offer a few additional observations and musings.
Last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report attempted to raise a question that, as I see it, deserves much more discussion than it gets these days. Most currently popular ways of trying to put pressure on the American political system presuppose that the politicians will pay attention if the people, or the activists who claim to speak in their name, simply make enough noise. The difficulty is that the activists, or for that matter the people, aren’t actually giving the politicians any reason to pay attention; they’re simply making noise, and the politicians have gotten increasingly confident that the noise can be ignored with impunity.
For a real conservative, then whatever’s old gets the benefit of the doubt. Whatever’s new is guilty until proven innocent. For my part, I think that many of the innovations of the fossil-fuel era may ultimately bring more danger than benefit, whether it’s personal cars, coal-fired electricity or the whole chemical industry. This view is making me pretty conservative.
The obvious and important difference between this potential Sixth Great Extinction and all the others is that they had natural, unavoidable causes. There are fewer and fewer deniers now that our fossil-fueled grow-consume-lay waste-deplete global economy is the cause of this one.
When empires crumble, as they always do, the result is often a free-for-all among previous subject nations and potential rivals as they sort out power relations.
So while I don’t advise anyone to get ready for an end of the world, I do think you’ll want to get right on the ball prepping for the end of YOUR world – the one that had enough fossil fuels to generate endless economic growth.
Somewhere in the holiday season between shoppers breaking down Walmart doors on Black Friday and the wise men showing up with gifts for the baby Jesus, my town has been holding an event known as the "Abundance Swap."
Last year, at their national decision-making forum in Canterbury, British Quakers made a collective commitment to become a ‘sustainable, low carbon community’. This makes British Quakers potentially the first ‘Transition Religion’.
Christmas season is making me tired. And I’m just as tired of hearing Fox News announcers sound more and more shrill each year as they hammer on a War on Christmas allegedly waged by militant secularists, atheists and other non-real-American types.
I was inspired enough by the set up of Share Tompkins that I decided to host an occasional swap of my own with a very specific focus: fiber arts. People who are not interested in working with string may not be aware of this, but Ithaca has dozens — if not hundreds — of talented spinners, knitters, crocheters, and lacemakers. I happen to know a bunch of them, and I happen to know that this is a group that often has big plans that don’t pan out, so we usually end up with extra materials.
