Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What are we for? What do we desire? While I acknowledge my own distasteful and ill-designed dependence on fossil fuels, I can heartily say I’m for community gardens, walkable and bikable cities, local economies that are (shockingly!) based on a currency besides money, and for vacant land and homes being available to those who need them or will make use of them.
– America’s dish detergent wars
– Can the Right Spin the Chilean Miners Story?
– A Peak Oil Lament
– When I learned that water isn’t supposed to have a taste
– Has the U.S. Passed the Point of Peak Water?
– Expect More Floods as Global Water Cycle Speeds Up
– When Will Our Water Be Clean?
– In Los Angeles, people come out to play when streets are closed to cars (video of CicLAvia)
– There’s safety in numbers for cyclists
– 7 Rules for Sustainable Communities – British Columbia edition
In an age when wealth and power present a more diffuse and benign face to the world, the soft authority of knowledge is ever more important as a force for social change. The politics of knowledge – how ideas are created, used and disseminated – represents a key issue for the social change community.
How green are electric cars?
The last thing “Dr. Doom” Bob Hamlin expected was citizens offering to help his county Emergency Management Department. But when Deborah Stinson from Port Townsend’s Local 20/20 came to Bob’s office after Hurricane Katrina, they formed a partnership. Citizens are organizing and educating neighborhoods to be more self-reliant in emergencies. And they’re at the table with emergency responders in planning for disasters.
In the past hundred years, we have created lifestyles, communities, food systems, water systems, transportation systems, and health systems that are entirely reliant on cheap and plentiful oil and that assume a favorable and stable climate.
Apple today announced record sales of the recently released iFinger implants. Although smaller than the iBellyTop and the iForearm, the iFinger continues the concept of a wafer-thin chip-screen embedded in the human body, available around the clock and at any location for viewing Internet, videos, and music. Apple proclaimed, “The iFinger technology will change life as we know it across the planet forever in every way possible.”
It is time to fuse the analysis and hard work of the environmental community with the vision and commitment of the justice community, into a whole new form of governance that not only challenges the current model of unlimited growth and economic globalization but promotes an alternative that will allow us and the Earth to survive. It means the recovery of an old concept called the Commons.
– After peak oil, peak steel?
– How air-conditioning is baking our world
– Planes Don’t Kill People – Plane Exhaust Does
– Western Lifestyles Plundering Tropics at Record Rate, WWF Report Shows
Complexity theory argues that simple, complicated, complex and chaotic systems have fundamentally different properties, and therefore different approaches and processes are needed when dealing with issues and challenges in each of these types of systems.
