Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I call the project “Indigeny” – that is, becoming local to your place, creating a culture that can go on, not just ’a bit after the fossil fuels run out” but for generations, and one that results in a life worth having. Without this, we are merely minimizing losses – and all of us need more than that.
In the unfolding global financial collapse, it is not just our accounts and balance sheets that come up short, but our language as well. What do you call a bunch of liar loans packaged into toxic assets and placed on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve as collateral for rescue loans? … The Russians actually have a word for precisely the thing that has bewitched us, first accounting for an ever-increasing share of our gross domestic product, and is now responsible for our ever-larger financial black hole.
The sun is getting stronger every day, and I’ve started cooking with a solar oven again. Friday I cooked up a pot of potatoes in my oven from the Solar Oven Society. Yesterday it was a black bean stew–there wasn’t quite enough heat from the day in the sun to cook the beans completely, but half an hour on low heat on the range finished their cooking. Today a pot of beets cooked in the sun.
Many discussions of preserving information for the deindustrial future focus on the internet and other high-tech options. A step or two down the technological ladder offers options that are much more likely to find their way from discussion into reality.
Religious communities are going to have a large and powerful role in the future – one that ideally, we’d begin shaping and preparing for today. This is one of the reasons I’m never so delighted as when I’m asked to talk to religious communities – because in many ways, I think that they provide an existing infrastructure that is potentially powerfully adaptable to the life we will be living.
Global forum seeks to avert water crisis
Preparing for Water Quarrels, if not Wars
Chilean Town Withers in Free Market for Water
New Statesman: Planet overload
Green agendas and grey dawns
World population to reach 9 billion by 2050: UN projections
Volunteer army takes on oceans of trash
Boat made of plastic bottles to make ocean voyage
A call to go (nearly) paperless
As the economy slumps, so does trash
The Great Outdoors arose out of ideas developed from the Free Range Network’s Less is a Four Letter Word initiative. We had to solve the problem of communicating the need for change encapsulated in the question, “in a world of excess consumption and luxury, how do you develop a means of teaching people to live simply?” …After much deliberation we hit upon a quite novel approach — we go camping!
Population growth lies at the core of all questions of “sustainability”. It is growth of the human population and the increasing resources that it requires that drives the destruction of habitats, the increasing levels of pollution (especially CO2), and the accelerating depletion of finite resources. It is impossible to stop exacerbating these problems if we do not stop population growth.
The future of the green blogosphere
Ithaca College program relishes change in media
San Francisco historians condemn 1906 Earthquake deniers
Bodging describes the act of creating things from a mish mash of available materials in a makeshift workshop. Derived from the term to bodge which specifically refers to the turning of tree branches into chair legs using a foot operated lathe. Such free materials as a bodger might use, today, can be found in the form of recyclables left on the curb and the rapidly disappearing “big trash” day.
