Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
One thing I learned from plants, I said to Dan as we headed home to Suffolk and resumed our discussion about roadside herbs, is that whatever you experience in the company of the plant that is the medicine. What makes the medicine is the looking back on that experience afterwards, the dialogue you hold about it and the story you then tell the world. So after the whirlwind three days in Liverpool what is that story?
We will be organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion. There will be less of a lot of things we have come to take for granted (energy and natural resources) and more of other things we’ve been hiding under the rug for a long time (toxic residue and environmental disruption).
That less/more reality in the physical world will no doubt have an effect on our political/economic/social worlds. It may well be that the liberal tolerance that has been hard-won by subordinated groups will evaporate rather quickly with intensified competition to acquire energy resources and avoid toxic disruptions. A willingness to share power and wealth during times of abundance doesn’t automatically endure in times of scarcity. Scapegoating, a time-honored tactic, is especially useful during hard times.
Ollanta Humala was elected President of Peru on June 5, 2011. The one sure loser in this election was the United States .
Peru has been the focal point of two geopolitical struggles. One was between Brazil and the United States. Under Lula’s presidency, Brazil had been struggling with considerable success to achieve South American autonomy. The second geopolitical struggle was between China and the United States in the search for privileged access to South America’s mineral and energy resources. Peru once again was a key site.
In Follett’s book, you see the hard lives of the Welsh coal miners, the English servants and the Russian peasants. And you see the rulers declaring war, losing millions of lives — usually poor people’s lives. And, of course, as in Victorian novels, the poor people often seem to have more character than the rich.
… It’s not enough to bemoan the decline of democracy or complain about the accumulation of wealth at the top — we need to act. What we learn in Follett’s book is what many of us have learned from experience: There’s nothing so exhilarating or fulfilling as joining with others to fight for what you believe in.
The university as a repository of knowledge may well have peaked and be rapidly going the same way as slide rulers and mechanical typewriters went. Disappeared; surpassed by faster, better, wider ranging instruments. We need to think of new an more dynamic ways to pass knowledge; we need to stop this weird ritual in which you say things to young people who look at you, but you have no way to know whether they are actually decoding the sounds you are uttering.
We should rather focus on the direct, human contact with a teacher. The relation with a mentor has been fundamental in history and it is likely to remain the master way to attain knowledge. But that happens outside classrooms; it has always been like that, and it always will be.
You are deep in the woods at nightfall and it has started to rain.
You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been ‘volunteered’ for some sustainable-team-building-thingummy-whatsit that you only agreed to because you’ve just applied for a promotion. And now you are bracing yourself for a long uncomfortable night in a make-shift shelter a bit too up close and personal with your three unlikely companions…
On the 4th of July my wife Julie and I were biking through downtown Minneapolis to see fireworks at the Mississippi River when someone shouted at us: “Take your clothes off.” We weren’t sure whether to be offended or flattered, until realizing we had pedaled into the midst of a naked bicycle ride.
An article published in the New York Times Science/Environment section Sunday points out something that many U.S. bike insiders and advocates have known for a long time: The reason European cities (and in the case of the article, Zurich) succeed in transportation policy and outcomes is because they’re not afraid to challenge car dominance head on.
"There’s a new species evolving. Long time ago, Cro Magnon and Homo Sapiens existed side by side. Cro Magnon went extinct. Now we live in a world with a new species called Post Petroleum Man with a completely different consciousness. That’s the only distinction. We don’t have a different number of fingers, the organs are in the same places. But the evolution is a complete change in the state of consciousness. We’re living essentially side by side, and the new species is emerging while Petroleum Man is rapidly going extinct." (video and transcript)
I work with the assumption that waking up to Peak Oil and preparing for Transition is just a special case of awakening in general, and that this awakening requires really looking at the symbols we’ve created and how we relate to them. Casinos provide an illuminating glimpse into the challenges of waking up within entrenched and often tyrannical systems of signs.
The affirmation of the domestic sphere, of the informal economy and of women’s work is itself a radical act in a culture that assumes that one should purchase all goods and services once provided by the informal economy. Any of you who have read _Depletion and Abundance_ will know that I consider the dismantling of the informal economy (which is the larger portion of the world economy, represent 3/4 of total economic activity) in the developed world and the undermining of the Global South’s informal economy to be a disaster in the making, as we run out of the fuel (and the ability to safely burn it, if such a thing can ever be said to have existed) that permitted this.
I’m frequently being asked for tips on how to get a new local group started. As I sat down this week to write it out yet again, it seemed like the kind of info that might be of interest to other groups (both Transition and not-yet-Transition groups). So, I decided to post it here. If you’re contemplating beginning a Transition group in your local neighborhood …
