Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In a week in which the Leveson inquiry shone a light on the overlap between big business and politics, news that Shell made £2m an hour in Q1 demonstrated only too well why creating the political will to move away from oil appears to be such an uphill battle.
An underappreciated characteristic of co-ops is that nearly all of them fit our definition of locally owned—that is, probably 99.9 percent are connected to a particular place and owned by geographically proximate members. Even large co-ops that sprawl across the country have many of the characteristics of local businesses….Adam Schwartz, vice president for public affairs and member services for the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA), says, “No matter how large a cooperative is, because it is owned by the individual farmers or individual consumers or small businesses, I feel very comfortable making a case that co-ops in any form support local business.”
The sudden disruption of the financial system, which became apparent in 2008, is affecting many people already. However the greatest impacts of ‘peak money’ may yet unfold. ‘Peak money’ could change many aspects of ‘normal’ life, from the personal to the governmental level, much as peak oil and climate change do, but in a much more abrupt way. The Transition movement needs to think through consequences and responses. What are we doing in our communities to create economic resilience and where are the gaps? What might our response be when governments make sweeping changes in services or propose draconian measures?
In the wake of last week’s post, I’d meant to plunge straight into the next part of this sequence of posts and talk about the unraveling of American politics. Still, it’s worth remembering that the twilight of America’s global empire is merely an incident in the greater trajectory of the end of the industrial age, and part of that greater trajectory may just have come into sight over the last week.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS a signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?
To mark the release of In Transition 2.0 — an inspirational film about communities printing their own money, growing food, localising their economies and setting up community power stations — I spoke to Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network and Transition Totnes, about energy ownership, cooperative finance strategies, and how storytelling can change our expectations of ourselves and our communities.
Just about every sustainability magazine on the planet, much less the food ones seems obsessed with no-knead breads. No-knead is trumpeted by everyone on the planet as the easy, awesome way to make bread, the thing that will convert non-bread makers into converts. Now don’t get me wrong – I don’t really have a dog in this hunt – I’m certainly not opposed to no-knead, but I don’t see it as the miracle that some do.
The fact that economists were at the podium questioning the equivalence of happiness and GDP is a hopeful sign, a sign of a deep crack in the foundation of the economics discipline. But it is one thing to say there is more to happiness than economic growth; it is quite another to propose that economic growth is inimical to generalized happiness. None of the speakers advocated an end to growth – that would be called, in the present vocabulary, economic stagnation or recession. Instead, they invoked, again and again, “sustainable development,” a phrase I must have heard 30 times.
A new report has just been published which ought to provoke a Copernican revolution in dominant conceptions of renewable energy and of sustainability more generally. The message may not be one that environmentalists want to hear, but it is one that we must all take very seriously, or risk having our good intentions dedicated to goals that cannot actually solve the very real environmental crises that we face.
In 1984 Fritjof Capra had the bright idea of founding the Elmwood Institute, an ecological think thank. In 1992 I undertook to morph our newsletter into a quarterly journal. In the inaugural issue, on “redefining wealth,” the editor’s letter used the metaphor of the cornucopia to discuss emerging challenges. What is so startling, 20 years later, is that while some of the challenges are now more familiar, they remain far from being met. Perhaps part of resilience is having different goals.
The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power.
Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.
