Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So long as we see ourselves standing on a cliff’s edge, we’ll keep swinging unproductively between visions of full spectrum catastrophe and wishful thinking—a kind of circular paralysis—while real opportunity goes unnoticed. It feels a little like motion, but never gets us anywhere.
President Obama’s proposal to spend $50 billion on transportation infrastructure – including 4,000 miles of rail lines – couldn’t be a better expenditure. … Trains are one of the last public spaces left in our society and they also demand a different kind of behavior than we are accustomed in today’s fast-paced, impersonal, high-security, privatized society. You can interact with other passengers you don’t know, feel safe with them, and be with people who are largely respectful toward their fellow travelers.
– The environmentalist’s paradox: we do better while the earth does worse
– Smile, You’re an Activist!
– The Weirdest People in the World?
– A Short History of Progress
Pulcinella was the most restless marionette in the old theater. He always had something to protest about. At performance time, he wanted to take a stroll. Or the puppet-master gave him a comic role when he had wanted something more serious.
“One day or another,” he confided to Arlecchino the Harlequin, “I’m going to cut my strings.” And that’s what he did, but it wasn’t during the day. One night he’d gotten a hold of a pair of scissors that the puppet-master had left behind. One after the other, he cut the strings tied to his head, his hands and his feet.
The dictionary defines xenophobia as “fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.” It seems to be an endemic plague everywhere in the world. But it infects larger numbers of people only sometimes. This is one of those times.
Policy makers in Asia still execute piecemeal solutions to reduce the traffic externalities without considering long term impacts. This article tries to clear some of the misconceptions about transportation. Many research reports over the last decade have debunked some of the traditional approach towards solving transport problems.
As part of its focus on action in the present–the moment at which oil is peaking–as a time of opportunity for decisive action of historical consequences, the Transition Movement embraces the act of telling stories; stories are a crucial tool for this monumental change–as important, perhaps, as our new-found ability to darn socks and grow Kale. (Part 2 of “Existential Comfort in the Age of Hopkins and Greer”)
…fortunately I don’t actually have to choose between Hopkins and Greer. If I did have to, I would feel that much of what drew me to Transition had been lost to organizational identity and pride. One is only forced to make such a choice when a set of ideas or principles gets mistaken for the foundation or orthodoxy of a Movement. Those of us in Transition should take this as a great warning.
A short history of the peak oil movement and reflections on wizards, Transition and the interstices of reason. Let us start with persona, since one goes to any prizefight to see the metaphorical battle of two created characters, embodying sides, virtues, faults.
In this Corna… John Michael Greer, owner (by a whisker over Bob Waldrop) of the finest beard in Peak Oildom, Archdruid, moral descendent of Toynbee and Gibbon, considerer of declines in centuries, not weekends. No Zombies for Greer – we are Rome, and we might as well deal with it, dammit.
in this Corna…Rob Hopkins, beardless founder of the Transition movement, permaculturist, endless energetic optimist and municipal leader, student of the first half of the British century, bent of reorganizing his community and the world to adapt to energy descent. If we could live without that energy once before, well, we can do it now, and let’s get at it.
– World’s Greenest Priest Leads Global Prayer Against Climate Change
– Zen and the art of protecting the planet (Thich Nhat Hahn)
– Social Traps and the Problem of Trust
Jim Kunstler’s question: Where the hell are all the “reasonable, rational, educated people of purpose in this country”? Well, some of us are at home tending chickens and pruning tomatoes. Some of us have realized that we can’t be everywhere at once and have made a choice. We may not be making front page headlines in daring acts of activism; but having organized marches down main street in my time, I can tell you that nothing has ever brought my community together more effectively than putting a shovel in the ground and growing vegetables in plain sight.
Proponents of the so-called “barbarian invasion” theory today warned of the “potentially disastrous” effects of hundreds of thousands of Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals plundering the imperial capital, including death, despoilment and dismemberment of the populace, and destruction of the city’s ancient architecture and temples.
