Year: 2012

Finding your calling in a Transition world

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Personally I’m at the cusp of stay-at-home-mom returning to the workforce. The landscape of the working world has completely transformed during the decade-and-a-half I’ve been out of it. I’d done quite a bit of volunteer work, but that is a very different scene. I was facing going back to classes to gear up to reenter the corporate world I left many years ago, all the while knowing that corporate world was on self-destruct like some massive Death Star, or …

Or what?

Sea level pressure changes since 2007

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I wanted to cross-check for myself some of the work Chris Reynolds has done looking at changes in weather patterns since 2007 (the beginning of the recent sea ice collapse)…So, it does rather look like an abrupt shift in the early summer northern hemisphere circulation has occurred since 2007 and is having multiple effects – poor summers in the UK, melting sea ice – and presumably accelerated warming of the Greenland ice sheet also.

The obvious questions are: why? and will it continue?

Digital snow days

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As we progress further into descent, we will see more electricity brownouts, blackouts, and other events where there is a sudden failure of complexity, resulting in a shutdown of productivity. This failure of complexity has created a new urban word: “digital snow day.” And since our digital snow day in Anchorage coincided this time with termination dust on the mountains, the name is especially fitting. When we lose complexity suddenly, much of modern life stops, as our subsystems are highly connected. When complexity brownouts occur, what systems will be impacted, and what will some of those snow days look like? Does digitization make the failures worse, with a drop to a lower trophic level than would have occurred without digitization?

Our years of magical thinking: interview with James Kunstler

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“Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson

“That’s a pithy way of saying where our country, perhaps the developed world, is at right now,” notes author James Howard Kunstler. We’ve blown past the mileposts for global peak oil, says Kunstler in his new book, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation, and we expect technology to save us.

The next ten billion years

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Professor Bardi gives us a telescopic sweep of scenario building that starts from the remote past and takes us to the remote future over a total range of 20 billion years. While the past is what it was, our future bifurcates into two scenarios; one “good” and the other “bad”, all depending on what we’ll be doing in the coming years.

Pathways to a new society

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George Lakey has campaigned and written about non-violent social change since the 1960s. He says:

“… people get farther if they do have a vision of the new society and that be a widely shared vision that comes about through a discussion. That process seems to be very important, that people both develop a vision of where they want to go and also a strategy from getting from here to there.”

The impact of evolutionary nuns on shaping the next culture

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The nuns provide a model for all who are exploring ways in which humanity can reconstitute itself and forge a post-industrial culture that radically departs from the paradigm of industrial civilization. Members of Sisters Of The Earth are deeply involved not only with social justice issues, but with local organic food efforts, permaculture, the Transition movment, raising awareness on climate change, economic justice, and sustainable living.

Power from the people (new Community Resilience Guide)

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The second book in our Community Resilience Guides series with Chelsea Green Publishing, Power From the People illustrates how communities across the country are already generating their own energy at the local level. From citizen-owned wind turbines to co-op biofuel producers to community-wide initiatives combining multiple resources and technologies, Pahl outlines the steps necessary and plan, organize, finance and launch community energy projects.

The linkages between money & community

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The relationship between money and community is not very obvious if only because we tend to regard money as a “real thing,” not an artificial social creation and abstraction. Fortunately, a recent essay in Cultural Anthropology Online (May 2012) offers some helpful insights into the ways in which money and community are inextricably connected.

But the economy is getting better and better!

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Shockingly (or not so much, if you read here regularly), despite the supposed improvements in the economy, more and more American families are struggling to put meals on the table. The USDA reports a record 46.7 million American households are on food stamps. 17.9 % of American households (up 700,000 from 2010) didn’t have enough food at least some of the time.