Society

Words which matter to people

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I wish to argue only this: that the end of all our questioning will not be a set of universal abstractions that transcend the messiness and peculiarity of the local cultural concepts with which we find ourselves. That abstract technical concepts, however usefully they serve within their own context, will always lack the power of living language. And that, if we wish the qualities that we may associate with resilience to take root in the places where we live, we would do well to look for concepts and stories which embody those qualities, and words which matter to people.

Green waste

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The disposal of product “wastes” in America has seen an exponential increase in quantity in the past century. In a mere one-hundred years they’ve grown from only 92 pounds of throw-away trash per person per year to a staggering 1,242 pounds per person per year. Do the math on that for yourself.

Deep roots of community resilience

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Victor Hugo once wrote that “Religion, society, nature: these are the three struggles of man. These three conflicts are, at the same time, his three needs”. The literature and history of countries around the world seem to provide plenty of evidence to back up Hugo’s words. But in Japan, where prevailing Shinto and Buddhist beliefs are inextricably tied to nature, and traditional society was shaped around harmonious human-nature activities in satoyama landscapes, these three factors seem to have grown together and may provide some explanation for the tremendous resilience that communities in Japan’s Tohoku region have shown in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of 2011.

Fascination for Death

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We are a peculiar culture. We are extremely reluctant to accept the possibility that our civilization might decline and fall, like all those which have preceded us, yet consider the idea of utterly trashing the biosphere with a fascination which would have made an early twentieth century symbolist uneasy. We have had another example of it with a paper published in the June issue of Nature.

Work Bees

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Are you old enough to remember community Work Bees? Or, did you come along after most of the homestead “work” got out-sourced to “professionals?”

I’m old enough to remember Work Bees. And, I’m interested in reintroducing them. We’re living in a period of the Great Forgetting and part of reclaiming resilience is becoming reskilled in many of the practices that were native to our grandparents’ lives.

Cool ideas – August 8

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-Three Cool Inventions For a Greener World
-Take Back Your Gadgets! 6 Reasons To Love DIY
-Innovative Financing Can Help Small Businesses and Nonprofits Invest in Solar Power

A Complexity Approach to Sustainability – Theory and Application: Review

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The sustainability of a human society is not just about its relationship with the environment: it’s a problem concerning the nature of the society and the way it is organised. This is the important message of a book by Angela Espinosa and Jon Walker: A Complexity Approach to Sustainability — Theory and Practice. Both authors were pupils and colleagues of the late Stafford Beer who saw that hierarchical forms of government were incapable of dealing with the complexity of the problems faced by modern societies.

A suburban holiday

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I now think of my native country the way many of my countrymen think of Ireland, as a holiday destination, indulgent and surreal, except instead of a rollercoaster my daughter and I scream happily and hold on to the car as we drive around a highway cloverleaf, and instead of a castle I can take her to a Barnes and Noble the same size. But then, as much as we enjoy seeing friends and family again, I’m reminded why we’re raising our daughter somewhere else.