Year: 2011

What not to wear, Farmer Edition

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A reader, who asks to remain anonymous writes me that her graduate school boyfriend (soon hopefully to be fiance) has decided he wants a farm. What, she asks, do farmers wear? Despite the fact that I have no fashion sense to speak of, I did, in fact, coin the term “slow clothing” and am the official founder of the “slow clothing movement.” Thus, although my clothing motto is (stolen from the late, great Molly Ivins) “Woman who wears clothes so she won’t be nekkid,” I do, in fact, get emails every year during fashion week from Milan, which just shows that the universe is a very weird place ;-)). With these qualifications (ie, none) I do feel I can help our reader – perhaps not by telling her what to wear in her new life, but by offering guidelines about what *not* to wear.

Salvaging quality

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As Europe and the United States each engage in a classic game of chicken, using sovereign debt in place of more ordinary vehicles, the declining credit ratings of an assortment of governments have deep and subtle links to a more pervasive decline in the quality of goods and services available across the industrial world. The first stirrings of the salvage economy of the future offers one way to counter that process.

Yes we camp: A global fight for radical democracy

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Millenials all over the world have received a brutal political education. The lucky few of us paid far more and will get far less for our college degrees than any generation before, we have watched with dismay as our parents squabble over light bulbs while the seas boil, and we have witnessed the steady erosion of public space, individual rights, the fourth estate, and checks on executive power. The financial collapse of 2008 seemed to catch Baby Boomers by surprise, but for us, it was just another news story, a predictable event in a world spinning out of control….We have seen the house of cards start to tremble, we have watched our future sold to the lowest bidder, and we see it happening everywhere at once.

The power – and limits – of social movements

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We will be organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion. There will be less of a lot of things we have come to take for granted (energy and natural resources) and more of other things we’ve been hiding under the rug for a long time (toxic residue and environmental disruption).

That less/more reality in the physical world will no doubt have an effect on our political/economic/social worlds. It may well be that the liberal tolerance that has been hard-won by subordinated groups will evaporate rather quickly with intensified competition to acquire energy resources and avoid toxic disruptions. A willingness to share power and wealth during times of abundance doesn’t automatically endure in times of scarcity. Scapegoating, a time-honored tactic, is especially useful during hard times.

Some reflections on the 2011 Transition Network conference

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We had a great few days at Hope University in Liverpool. This will not be an attempt at a complete document of that event, you will find the most comprehensive record over at the Transition Network’s conference feed. What I am going to share, with links to some of the key pieces of media from that feed, is some of the notes of my reflections at the end of the conference. As the event drew to a close, I went around and asked people for their brief reflections on what they saw as the character unique to this conference in comparison to others. Three words came up again and again, deepening, focus and maturity.

Towards a post-growth society

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Today, the reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. Productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption: all must go continually up. This growth imperative trumps all else. It is widely believed that growth is always worth the price that must be paid for it—even when it undermines families, jobs, communities, the environment, and our sense of place and continuity.

Shale gas gives no emissions edge over coal

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For years now, everyone thought that natural gas was cleaner than coal and more benevolent than oil. The blue flame just burned purely and wasn’t nearly as complicated or carboniferous as a lump of, well, bituminous coal…But shale gas, methane trapped in hellishly deep rock formations, has challenged this dated perception. In fact, the very stuff that energy experts champion as North America’s new energy wunderkind may be dirtier than coal, if not as extreme as Alberta’s dirty bitumen.

Humala’s triumph in Peru: America’s defeat

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Ollanta Humala was elected President of Peru on June 5, 2011. The one sure loser in this election was the United States .

Peru has been the focal point of two geopolitical struggles. One was between Brazil and the United States. Under Lula’s presidency, Brazil had been struggling with considerable success to achieve South American autonomy. The second geopolitical struggle was between China and the United States in the search for privileged access to South America’s mineral and energy resources. Peru once again was a key site.

Murdochgate and the News: we need to reframe media and the public interest

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The news is no ordinary product, it is indelibly linked to the practice of democracy. When the product of news is broken, the practice of democracy suffers. The relationship between news and democracy works best when journalists are given the freedom (and resources) to do the job most journalists want to do — to scrutinize, to monitor, hold to account, interrogate power, to facilitate and maintain deliberation. But freedom in this context does not simply mean freedom from censorship and interference from government so frequently associated with the term ‘freedom of the press’; it also means freedom from the constraints and limitations of a thoroughly corporate culture. In neo-liberal democracies the power of the market is just as significant as the power of government.

The role of regulation in a steady state economy

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Regulations have played an essential role in modern attempts to curtail pollution, prevent abuses in the banking system, ensure safe food, and protect public health. They have been indispensable in checking powerful corporate interests that abuse the public trust. Now, just on the heels of the global financial collapse and forty years after the first Earth Day, we are witnessing two frustrating failures in the United States…

Peak exploration: The Apollo program and the high water mark of Western civilization

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As we lament the launching of the last U.S. space shuttle mission, we should pause for a moment and reflect on what it really means. Ironically, the first moon landing happened one year before America reached its domestic peak in oil production, which likely better explains more than any other single factor why the space program failed to advance after Apollo program wrapped up.