Society

Settling

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If we are to work on a community level, we’re going to have to use the old community and neighborhood organizing strategies, rather than a series of showings of End of Suburbia or How to Boil a Frog (don’t get me wrong, I really think very highly of these movies). That is, that we are going to have to be able to enlist people at very low levels of commonality, rather than at high levels of education about the future of the world if we’re to get enough bodies on the ground to do what is needed. And that these communities need to be built, well, yesterday.

Our House Frog Liked Beethoven

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When the hummingbirds run out of sugar water in their feeder right outside our kitchen, one of them flies up to the window and gently bumps it. Doesn’t run into it as if by accident, but hovers right at the pane and deliberately bumps it. The hummer seems to be saying: “The feeder is empty, you dolts. Get with it.” And they never bump the window unless the feeder is empty. They know. How do they know?

Sharing Stories at Post Carbon Institute

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We’d like to hear more about what you’re doing. As you may know, our Senior Fellow, Richard Heinberg, is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost educators on the perils of a global oil economy. Right now, Richard is starting his next book about how individuals and communities can build resilience in the face of uncertainty and rapid change caused by economic collapse, peak oil, climate change, and other crises. In short, this book is about you. So, you see, Richard wants to hear your stories; the stories of what individuals, families and communities are doing to transition to a post-carbon world.

Watching Myths Unwind

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I want to step back from our gargantuan dilemmas of 2009 and reflect on the East German intelligentsia I interviewed in 1990-1992 at the time of the unification of Germany…these East Germans faced the destruction of their national myth, which held that socialism was the true victor over Nazism and that capitalism’s demise was inevitable. In America unquestioned belief in growth has inspired us throughout our history, yet it is going the way of the East German’s mythology.

Transition culture, social tolerance and moral courage: Why permaculture activists must work for human rights and social justice

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Human beings are capable of living egalitarian lives without fossil fuels. Many hunter-gatherer societies testify to the fact it is possible, though not inevitable. Human nature includes both cooperative/altruistic and competitive/“us versus them” tendencies. Our empathetic and cooperative tendencies must be consciously cultivated in everyday life if we are to create a non-violent, democratic future without fossil fuels.

Drink entire: against the madness of crowds

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I wonder if there might be some magic elixir, as the Bradbury short-story hinted at, that could take us away from the madness and anger swelling up around us these days in the public realm. A very narrow but loud and aggressive demographic has been ignited against health care reform and climate change policy and this sparking fuse is growing closer to the combustible source. There is unquestionably a close parallel between the people who have been motivated to erupt at town hall events and those who have been hurt the most by the economic downturn over the last year.

the land speaks

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In “reading” these words, do you say anything? More likely, you read silently—or more accurately, subvocalize. Like microexpressions, reading, like emotion, still inheres to movement of the human body. It cannot take place solely in an incorporeal “mind,” our fantasies of such aside. We can fool ourselves into that notion only because we’ve reduced the motions involved to the most fleeting versions, giving the superficial impression that they barely happen at all.

Peak energy and cultural fragmentation

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Last week, I went to Paimpol with my girlfriend to attend the Sailor Songs Festival…As we were strolling along the wharves amidst a joyful crowd, she told me me “we’re no longer in France”. The fact that the greater part of what makes the region so un-french is fairly recent does not make her remark less pertinent. In fact it makes it even more so as it highlights a particularly important factor in the coming energy descent : cultural differentiation

The demise of the middle class

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It has been pointed out that collapses are hard on ruling classes. It is a fact that they are far more dependent upon the continued existence of a complex society than the average subsistence farmer and when the said complex society unravels, they tend to be brutally replaced by people more adapted to the new situation…There is, however, another, less talked about, casualty of collapses : the middle class.