Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
People around the country have been forming small groups like Resilience Circles and social action affinity groups. These groups are a way to relearn skills of mutuality, consensus-building, story-sharing, and real listening. They form an essential piece of the architecture of social movements built on solidarity and relatedness.
But pulling together a small group can be a real challenge.
Whether you buy into Revolution’s watered-down examination of social contract theory, the show’s premise reinforces Post Carbon Institute’s position that it is absolutely necessary that we plan our energy future. We must work hard to transition as smoothly as possible to largely fossil fuel free communities. If we’re caught off guard (too late?), chaos is quite likely.
Below you can read reviews by Mark Garavan and Anne B. Ryan of Tina Evan’s book Occupy Education: Learning and Living Sustainability. What is an educator to do in these times in an effort to help students and communities avert disaster – or to help prepare ourselves and others to engage in sustainability-oriented action in the wake of disturbing, if not devastating, changes in our world?
Since Babylon’s U.S. region is currently in the grip of its periodic voting hysteria, many pundits, apologists and propagandists for Wall Street’s Lefty/Righty sockpuppets assure us that we absolutely must vote. They even go as far as asserting, as Rebecca Solnit does, that “if you want to be political you have to pay attention to electoral politics and maybe even work with it.” Gasp. You can’t be political without turning into an Obamabot or a Romney dawg (the Noz Pinscher)?! What a ghastly world some people inhabit, and by choice, no less…
The Baltic Sea is just one example of a challenge that crops up everywhere. Think about the food systems of a city; the restoration of a river; the management of informal waste economies; or the care of older people. In all such contexts, a variety of different actors and stakeholders — formal and informal, big and small — need to to work together.
Spreading awareness that the human population is in overshoot of the carrying capacity of the planet has led to a number of attempts to calculate what the true carrying capacity might be. My objective here is not to provide another calculation, but to explore some issues that need to be faced to address the question properly. To start thinking about the problem, I am choosing as a point of reference the global population of about 1 billion that existed in 1800 before the main thrust of the industrial revolution.
There are two major school networks in France, and a large number of minor ones. Public Schools (écoles publique), also called Secular Schools (écoles laïques), are state run and free (as in free beer). In most areas, they are the default schools and their quality is highly dependent upon their localization. Some, in suburban ghettos for instance, are dreadful, others, such as Henri IV in Paris or Clémenceau in Nantes, are elite institutions, on par with the best British public schools can offer.
It’s corn maze season and as the days get shorter and the air crisper, many tourists and locals will find themselves wandering lost through the walls of tall stalks until they reach the end of the maze and solve the puzzle. It’s a tradition that has taken hold of our society and become synonymous with autumn…Hundreds of years ago it would not have been uncommon to find pilgrims following a maze, deep in prayer or meditation, quickly losing track of the physical world when lost in complex twists and turns of a hedge or wall. Although our modern interpretation of this maze might not have the same spiritual gravitas as the medieval labyrinth, its walls continue to reveal certain truths worth contemplating about our contemporary society.
So here I want to lay out an insanely obvious principle that apparently needs clarification. There are bad things and they are bad. There are good things and they are good, even though the bad things are bad. The mentioning of something good does not require the automatic assertion of a bad thing. The good thing might be an interesting avenue to pursue in itself if you want to get anywhere. In that context, the bad thing has all the safety of a dead end. And yes, much in the realm of electoral politics is hideous, but since it also shapes quite a bit of the world, if you want to be political or even informed you have to pay attention to it and maybe even work with it.
Last year I visited Montreal to attend the Ecocity World Summit, a biannual gathering of visionaries from around the globe committed to creating cities where people live in mutually enriching relationship with each other and with the Earth. Looking at cities as living breathing organisms, with all their residents human and non-human forming an intricate web of interdependence, the very idea of an ecocity is rooted in a sharing principle, where citizens understand not only the physical value of making the most of our natural resources, but the cultural, spiritual, ecological, and ultimately, economic value inherent in building networks and communities.
To get back to this season’s water crisis, it’s the rich opportunities for reuse and recycling – not the scarcity – that should focus municipal debate about water. Actually, conserving or cutting back on water use is only a drop in the bucket of the water cycle-based strategy that’s needed.
Those with strong cycling legs have ever more jobs up for grabs in Europe these days. A growing number of businesses are using cargo cycles, a move towards sustainable and free-flowing city traffic that is now strongly backed by public authorities.
