Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Painting climate change as sheer disaster without offering an alternative vision blows people’s world to pieces and offers them nothing. This is what Rob Hopkins, an environmental grassroots campaign award-winner, sees as a significant challenge to roping people into cutting their carbon emissions.
-Nitrogen footprint warning from European agency
-Soil Erosion Far Worse Than Reported In American Farmlands, According To New EWG Report (VIDEO)
-Biofuels targets are ‘unethical’, says Nuffield report
– Family farm in Willamette Valley turns to flax (New)
History is being made in the corn market and the mainstream press isn’t paying attention. Corn prices hit an all time high last week. As you pull on your boots and head for the garden or fields for spring planting, what are your plans? Are you ready for some seismic changes in food prices? Do you feel too helpless to do anything much but keep on hoeing?
When I read the passages in the novel describing one of the festivals of The Church of the Almighty Good Food, I imagined a Breughel-like painting, teeming with ordinary folk enjoying one another and sumptuous foods in the midst of a sea of cornstalks. I even imagined a whisper from gently undulating tassels, “Serve it, and they will come.”
Given that we’re entering a prolonged period of economic contraction, what comes next? In the big picture, what are some of the possible routes forward? In the last post I critiqued some of the economic thinkers mentioned by the UK’s Rob Hopkins. In this post, I highlight several — including a U.S. source — which Hopkins hasn’t mentioned on his blog.
But we’re not broke. Not even close. The United States of America is awash in wealth. Our corporations are holding record trillions in cash. And overall individual wealth in the United States, the Credit Suisse Research Institute reported this past fall, has risen 23 percent since the year 2000, to $236,213 per American adult.
A non-profit organization in Oakland, Planting Justice, works to empower youth to resist the corporate-controlled and toxic industrial food system and become young leaders in the burgeoning urban food justice movement…Developing skills in critical thinking, community organizing, public speaking, and ecological entrepreneurship, these youths are changing the way they identify with the food they consume and becoming leaders to other students on their high school campus and in their after school programming.
A new global movement for happiness was launched Tuesday in the UK. Action for Happiness is supported by more than 4,500 members including the Dalai Lama. Based on the new science of happiness, the movement suggests that the keys to happier living lie in actions such as Giving, Relating and Accepting.
Media coverage has been extensive:
– 20 Happiness Facts
– Don’t worry, every little thing’s gonna be all right
– Switch off, chip in, be happy, say activists
– My advice for the happiness lobby? Start with drugs
– Britons becoming ‘increasingly miserable’, warns happiness group
– Happy evangelists take on the cynics
– It’s time the right looks beyond its prejudices and understands what this agenda is about
– Bolivia enshrines natural world’s rights with equal status for Mother Earth
– Bolivia After the Storm (raising fuel prices)
– German Greens on the rise
– WikiLeaks cable: Politicians, military – not militants – behind most Nigeria oil thefts
One of the least discussed and most fascinating features of the present day is that the strategies that got the world through the energy crisis of the Seventies are being pointedly ignored, not only by governments and corporations but by a great many of the people who claim to be offering alternative views. The obvious and successful response then — rallying the collective will and enthusiasm of the people by ‘fessing up to the arrival of crisis, and using that will and enthusiasm to slash energy consumption — has been all but erased from our collective imagination and memory. Maybe it’s time to take a hard look at how that erasure happened.
