Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– Nation Waiting For Protesters To Clearly Articulate Demands Before Ignoring Them
– Occupy Protests’ Seismic Effect
– Greece on the Brink of Emergency: A Matter of Days
– Kunstler: Going Apeshit
– Business Insider: Here’s What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About…
– Jan Lundberg: The Occupiers’ dream: an easy revolution?
A new report from Greenpeace calls for the complete closure of all Japanese nuclear power plants by 2012. The report was released at the same time as the new Prime Minister, Yoshihiko Noda, was making his first policy speech to parliament calling for the restart of all reactors that are currently offline due to routine safety checks and maintenance.
It seems remarkably hard for people nowadays to remember that ours is hardly the first society to find itself teetering on the edge of catastrophic change. In this next installment of The Archdruid Report‘s discussion of the interface between peak oil and magic–that is, the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will–another society in much the same situation provides the stage, and one of the most improbable figures in 19th century history is the main character. His insights have an uncanny relevance to some elements of the crisis of our own time.
Bill Ryerson, Robert Walker, and Julia Whitty examine population’s complex, pervasive relationship to the most pressing issues of our time, including climate change, biodiversity losses, global equity and human rights.
Shareable publisher Neal Gorenflo and founder of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives Michel Bauwens talked with solidarity economy activist and organizer Mira Luna about the historical moment and what’s coming soon from alternative economies
Bill Ryerson, Robert Walker, and Julia Whitty examine population’s complex, pervasive relationship to the most pressing issues of our time, including climate change, biodiversity losses, global equity and human rights.
Occupy Wall Street gatherings on Oct. 15 at around 1500 sites in some 80 countries revealed a global uprising for building democratic learning and action communities. People were joyous to be together in streets and parks, on church steps, outside banks, and elsewhere—playing music, chanting, and exercising their freedoms. They sat in circles, paraded around with bands, and fed each other in dramatic outpourings of anger, aspiration, feelings, energy, humor, yearning, and wisdom.
Dear young man who died on the fourth day of this turbulent 2011, dear Mohammed Bouazizi, I want to write you about an astonishing year — with three months yet to run. I want to tell you about the power of despair and the margins of hope and the bonds of civil society. I wish you could see the way that your small life and large death became a catalyst for the fall of so many dictators in what is known as the Arab Spring. We are now in some sort of an American Fall. Civil society here has suddenly hit the ground running, and we are all headed toward a future no one imagined when you, a young Tunisian vegetable seller capable of giving so much, who instead had so much taken from you, burned yourself to death to protest your impoverished and humiliated state.
In a world where income disparity is increasing and social regression is inherent in the current structure of the UK’s Feed-In Tariff (FIT), we need to rethink how community renewable energy projects are structured & financed to ensure full community benefit lies at the heart of the process and that energy reduction is still focused upon as part of a community “power down” process.
The New York Times is one of many major news outlets blowing the story of the century (see “Silence of the Lambs: Media herd’s coverage of climate change “fell off the map” in 2010”).
The one-time “paper of record” cut coverage sharply since its peak in 2006 and 2007 and failed to connect the dots — heck, a headline this week even blamed the recent record-setting Thailand floods on Thai “officials” not “an unusually heavy monsoon season.”
Canada has joined the ranks of exporting oil nations and now supplies more petroleum to the United States than Mexico or Saudi Arabia. The unconventional character of mined bitumen as well as the startling revenue it generates for government coffers has irrevocably changed the country. Five per cent of the nation’s GDP comes from oil while bitumen makes up 25 per cent of the nation’s exports. As the wild debate about the Keystone XL pipeline illustrates, Canada’s $200-billion energy project has also become a global lightning rod. No oil exporting nation, whether Christian or Muslim, is immune from the corrosive influence of oil money and its dirty politics. Yet Canada has anointed bitumen as the nation’s new “economic engine” without setting clear public policy goals or assessing the economic risks.
I know I shouldn’t be at all emotional, but honestly, I find myself a bit verklempt about moving my bank accounts out of Bank of America. Yes, it’s a hassle, but it needs to be done, as the Move Your Money Project makes amply clear. Since they’re a national bank, the biggest part of every dollar I deposit with Bank of America goes into the financial system and leaves my community. And if B of A uses my deposits to fund reckless speculation, fat bonuses for their execs or donations to Tea Party Congressmen, then my money will be harming America. And as a Transitioner trying to relocalize my area’s economy, I’ve felt especially guilty staying with a big corporate bank.
