Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A group of farmers in northwest Texas began 2012 under circumstances their forbearers could scarcely imagine: they faced a limit on the amount of groundwater they could pump from their own wells on their own property.
-Jaywalking and the Motor Age
-In China, Cars Lose A Little Luster
-Integration of Bicycling and Walking Facilities into the Infrastructure of Urban Communities [report]
-A Bay Area Experiment in Electric Bike Sharing
On February 6, journalist and activist Chris Hedges wrote a searing article on the Black Bloc. Occupy theorist David Graeber wrote an open letter in reply.
The Black Bloc first appeared in the 80s and has been with demonstrations across the world ever since. The Black Bloc is a tactic, whereby black-clad individuals wearing hoods and masks appear in the midst of a demonstration to trash stores, break windows, etc.
Not involved with Occupy? It’s still important. Occupy is a wild card which could break through the stalemate on energy, climate and politics which bedevils the United States. It could also fizzle out. Or it could take a dark direction, as did some of the radical politics in the 1970s.
– Portland, the US capital of alternative cool
– Are electric or hybrid cars a green marketing myth, or a real solution?
– Is This the Most Beautiful Street in the World?
– Voices from the previews of ‘In Transition 2.0′ (video)
– When the Transition Movement & the Community Rights Movement Start Collaborating, Watch Out!
The first thing you do is show a film. It starts with Power of Community. It starts at the 11th hour at the End of Suburbia. You go against your wishes, lured by a love of documentary, and find yourself talking animatedly amongst strangers about Life at the End of Empire, asking whether you can come to the next core group meeting. In these films there is a moment when you realise that life is not the fairy tale you have been taught to believe. It’s the moment you join Transition.
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That the real, physical world is the source of our own lives, and the lives of others. A weakened planet is less capable of supporting life, human or otherwise.
Thus the health of the real world is primary, more important than any social or economic system, because all social or economic systems are dependent upon a living planet.
In order to achieve sustainability, we need scenarios of where we want to go: not only warnings and plans, but also reports as if we’d already made the transition. Who would have suspected they’d come from the South Pacific?
Some nineteen months ago, this blog launched what I thought would be a relatively straightforward survey of the role of myth, narrative and the nonrational in shaping the peak oil debate. After a flurry of unexpected detours into Seventies appropriate tech, the end of the Space Age, and the theory of magic, just for starters, that survey has finally reached as much closure as it’s going to find. A glance back over the terrain just surveyed is in order, and a few loose ends need to be tied up, before proceeding to the next major theme I want to examine — the twilight of America’s empire and the implications of that massive geopolitical fact for the world.
Wendell Berry’s powerful book was the first stepping stone in the path that eventually brought me to the Transition Movement. It spoke of the places I visited almost every day, and the book itself had provided protection to those places against development.
It was powerful to me then because it spoke to my loneliness and feelings of failure in society. And it’s powerful to me now because it offers a scathing criticism of the things I’ve come to criticize myself.
How does Transition change your life? Utterly, completely, forever. Because if you embrace what it does, in the way my fellow reporter Jo Homan wrote about so beautifully last week, it will turn your life upside down – like a love affair. It will satisfy you in a way no consumer dream can ever do. It will broaden your intellect, it will engage you with the physical world, the earth and your own body, it will break you out of a tyranny of isolation as Mark wrote on Monday, and all the self-pity and antagonism that goes with that state. It will make you empathic with your fellows, connect you with the spirit of the times. And most of all it will give you back yourself.
I don’t particularly like cars. I don’t like the way they smell, on the inside or the outside. I don’t like the feeling of being trapped in a sheet metal-and-vinyl box, my body slowly warping to the shape of a bucket seat.
If any of this seems strange to you, then there may be something funny going on inside your head and you should get it checked out. Around the world, for over a century, people everywhere have used the bicycle to get around in every kind of climate and weather.
I’ve written the sort of book that someone conversant with Peak Oil etc. could give to a friend who is a committed Christian, and explains, not just the basic problems but *why* Christians should be concerned about it, how the real problems arose, and what in Christian terms should now be done.
It isn’t about addressing Peak Oil etc directly (e.g. prepare to use less fuel, advice about growing your own vegetables etc), it’s more about generating the required virtues that will enable those steps to then be taken.
