Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sometimes it seems that not much has changed in Glasgow over the five years since the Transition energy first took hold yet I and many of my fellow Transition’ers do experience a difference in what’s happening around the city. So how much of this change is to do with Transitions presence and how do you evaluate its effect on a city or community over time?
Akshay Ahuja reviews A Paradise Built in Hell, Good News, and The Long Loneliness.
For those who have followed the movement since its early days, the emergence of Occupy Sandy looks less like the endpoint of an erratic and itinerant journey than a necessary step in the ongoing evolution of the Occupy movement.
“Anybody can come through our gates 8 am-10 pm and use all of our facilities. We have hot showers, a telephone, free computers internet-ready, our commons, offices, [and a free store of donated items.] Anybody has access to this.”
The topic of last week’s post, the likely fate of Israel in the twilight years of American empire, makes a good example of more than one common theme. As I commented in that earlier discussion, Israel is one of several American client states for whom the end of our empire will also be the end of the line. At the same time, it also highlights a major source of international tension that bids fair to bring in a bumper crop of conflict in the decades before us.
The remarkable variety of life’s interdependent phenomena and processes — what we call ‘diversity’ — is being eroded by the modern forces of homogenization. The rich tapestry — woven from a countless multitude of mutually reinforcing strands of biological, cultural and linguistic relationships — is wearing out. Our increasingly fatigued world is losing its vitality, luminosity and splendour under a relentless assault from various “izations”, such as industrialization, colonization, secularization, computerization, globalization, and harmonization, to name a few.
Does art have a purpose? Can it change our sense of what is possible in the world?
•Earth’s most valuable resource is the space between the sand
•Moments of revelation trigger the biggest transformations
•Beyond Civilized and Primitive
•Why Gridlock Is Good (If You’re a Progressive)
If you look closely, you’ll see that local government is not just something you need to get around and that you don’t, in fact, have to fight City Hall. Indeed, City Hall may be just waiting for you to walk through the front door and take your place as an active citizen.
So how do you navigate that sense of loss, the trauma of changed expectations, the sense that all the things that you once believed you had a right to are now things you are a supplicant for?
A month after Frankenstorm Sandy struck, battle lines are beginning to be drawn in the wreckage along New York City’s shores.
At a speaking event in New York City this week, award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein discussed why the reconstruction from Superstorm Sandy is actually a great place to usher in progressive change.
