Society

What does it matter?

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When protest is successful, on those rare and remarkable and wondrous occasions when resistance is possible, it is successful not because of the pure, clear political persistence of actors who carry signs or passively protest or fight legal battles. Instead, it is successful because political protest is chained not to doors or trees but to the emergence of a new way of life. This way of life is not perfect or sufficient, but the overwhelming emergence of something new and different in ordinary and daily ways is a hallmark of almost every successful political protest.

What lies at the core of Pattern Language, and why should we care?

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Many individuals involved with Transition, including Rob Hopkins, have become fascinated with the work of Christopher Alexander and his development of pattern language. [He noticed] that any built environment is like a language in that the patterns communicate problems we confront in our environments but also contain within them the solutions. … Often overlooked is what Alexander calls the “luminous ground” on which the pattern language theory is built.

Top 10 peak oil books of 2010

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Having read enough books with Hubbert curves and charts of barrels-per-day to last us until the second Bristol Palin administration, we’re now into powerful stories that explore peak oil through suspense, romance and humanity. But so you won’t feel guilty having so much fun at the expense of the whole premise of industrial civilization, we’ve thrown in some more fact-y tomes too. Peak oil stalwarts from James Howard Kunstler to Richard Heinberg to Robert Hirsch made the list along with some surprising newcomers.

Truthtelling & activism – Dec 24

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– Why Bolivia Stood Alone in Opposing the Cancún Climate Agreement
– Is the Wikileaks Saga the Biggest Crypto-Environmental Story of 2010?
– Thinking Dialectically About Solidarity
– How nonprofit journalism is changing the ‘news ecosystem’
– Washington Post’s big story: Monitoring America: Your Local Neighborhood’s ‘Global War on Terror’

An interview with “Pattern Language” author Christopher Alexander

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Christopher Alexander, architect, thinker, designer, author of the seminal ‘A Pattern Language’ and of the more recent extraordinary ‘The Nature of Order’ series of books, has long been someone whose work I have admired greatly.

“… I finally realised that every one of these cultures had essentially a system of rules – though ‘rules’ is too strong a word because they were not binding. They weren’t being forced down somebody’s throat, but they were rules that everyone understood and which had to be used to get a good result.”

Post carbon politics Part II: The train of ancient and venerable prejudices

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But this post-peak oil revolution in expectations will not begin with any of our mainstream political parties, nor even according to familiar political values. With only minor differences about how the spoils of the oil age might be dispersed, cutting across political lines is the master-belief that if we have the right to anything we can afford. Whether liberal or conservative, progressive or reactionary, nearly all inhabitants of North Atlantic democracies lavish themselves with as much of the looted splendor of the age of cheap energy as they can seize. There is so little room outside of this hegemony of entitlement that this marginal space, until now perhaps, has been reserved only for an impractical fringe unaware of the democratic needs of a mass-society in the industrialized world.

What studying nature has taught us

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Fewer and fewer children get to explore the outdoor world and experience the thrill of watching birds or finding a turtle on the other side of a rotting log. Fewer children know about weeding a garden, let alone the special feeling of coming home a bit scratched up and sunburned after a long afternoon of exploring a local creek. Getting your feet wet and hands dirty is fun. There is something ineffably joyous about interacting with the natural world, but, more and more, that bliss is generationally bound, a gift today’s children won’t receive.

Six impossible things before breakfast

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In which I uncover the most compelling reason to stay put in my California home, track my about face from a knowledge driven quest for truth to an intuitively informed one, and contact the dead. …
California is the most conducive place for believing, as Lewis Carroll put it, six impossible things before breakfast.

Thinking like a creator – Transition and a pattern language

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Christopher Alexander’s masterwork of environmental design, written with several other architects and academics over eight years, lays out a practical and imaginal map for human dwellings and settlements. It’s a peculiarly European response to North America (Alexander is Austrian, educated in England, worked in Berkeley, California). A sudden release from an old cluttered history into a new unexplored world. The feeling you can start all over again with the best of everything you left behind.

Making democracy work

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Something extraordinary happened in our city, Sopot in Poland: four out of five candidates for city mayor declared that they would like to introduce participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting means that citizens are directly involved in deciding what the funds from the city budget are spent on. It is a great opportunity to make a turn towards sustainability, and for Transition initiatives or permaculture groups it is a tool to suggest concrete projects to achieve it.