Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
One of the reasons I came to the Transition movement was that it seemed to me to be the most viable, most broad-based, deepest-thinking “second dimension” approach available. There simply aren’t any other organizations I have found which are Creating New Structures with as considered and informed and panoramic a scope…Joanne gives her take on adapting Transition for the US.
As the global supply of fossil fuels shrink and oil gets more expensive, foods that have to be shipped long distances – and particularly those that have to be refrigerated in transit – will become much harder to afford. Urban agriculture, which already seems to be undergoing something of a renaissance, will become more necessary.
In most legal systems, you have a right to freedom of speech or religion, but you don’t have a right to breathe clean air or drink safe water.
I read Michael Brownlee’s recent piece “The Evolution of Transition in the US”, with a mixture of fascination and a sense of disquiet that increased the deeper I got into the piece. The concept of Transition has been regularly critiqued, a positive process which has helped to shape what it is today. Most critiques run along the lines of “Transition, nice idea, but it isn’t [ … ] enough”. So, for Alex Steffen, Transition isn’t technologically savvy or optimistic enough, for the Trapese Collective it isn’t politically savvy enough, for John Michael Greer it is guilty of “premature triumphalism”, for Ted Trainer it isn’t sufficiently rooted in alternative culture or focused enough, while for others it is too riven with New Age thinking and pseudoscience. Now, according to Brownlee, it is fatally flawed by not having the “Sacred” at the heart of what it does.
– Next Generation Democracy: What the Open Source Revolution Means for Power, Politics, and Change
– Cyber-Con (US government and the online revolution)
– The Atlantic: The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange
– Steve LeVine: Why diplomats secretly love WikiLeaks
– On WikiLeaks and Government Secrecy
– Dispatches from a beleaguered America in imperial retreat
– State Department To Columbia University Students: DO NOT Discuss WikiLeaks On Facebook, Twitter
– US blocks access to WikiLeaks for federal workers
– Cyber-Con (quotes on transparency from Obama and Clinton)
In the Q&A section of public presentations we often get asked “How do you tell people about Transition …” Then the questioner launches into a vivid description of how his attempts have failed to get through to his Hummer-driving brother-in-law, or his boss who vacations in the Bahamas, or his fellow churchgoers who rhapsodize over malls and “bargains” at big box stores, or his neighbor with the pristine, overwatered chem-lawn.
Long a proven technology in Europe, green roofs are becoming increasingly common in U.S. cities, with major initiatives in Chicago, Portland, and Washington, D.C. While initially more expensive than standard coverings, green roofs offer some major environmental — and economic — benefits.
More than a decade has passed since the first tentative email lists and conversations that launched the peak oil movement. During the years since, a central theme of nearly all factions of that movement has been the goal of inserting peak oil into the collective conversations of our time. The IEA’s awkward admission that the peak has already passed may just mark the arrival of the final stage in the struggle to make that happen. At this point, a new and even more challenging question emerges: now that we’ve won, what next?
I’m not a patriot in the political sense, but I derive a great deal of attachment to the material reality of my country, to the literal earth in which I am embedded.
How do we transition a city? The answer to that is perhaps, simply, for each of us look at a size that is manageable, and I don’t for one second mean by this that a city is too large, not at all, but what I do suggest is that we each ask ourselves a question; “What size of place feels manageable to me, personally?”
Trees are more than just the “lungs of the world.” Their role on this earth is pervasive, yet so often taken for granted.
