Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When I share with people my assessments of where the Earthlings are stumbling rather blindly, my listeners often say: “Oh, you are such a pessimist! What would you do differently?” My short answer is: “Stop, face reality, and think. Facing reality is not pessimism. Do not try to be a better, more obedient sheep, whose sheephood is certified by a Harvard et al. at a huge expense.
First, to be a hope-monger or a hope-peddler today is not just a sign of weakness but also of laziness, and sloth is one of the seven deadly sins. Don’t forget that, as good Christians, we try to avoid those.
Second, our world is not broken, it is dead. We are alive, if we choose to be, but the hierarchical systems of exploitation that structure the world in which we live — patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, white supremacy, and the industrial model — all are dead.
Food production and consumption comprise a major dimension of human life in which biological and cultural diversity intersect and are mutually reinforcing. The influence of biodiversity on Kanazawa’s food culture spans all the scales on which biodiversity occurs — from landscapes to local crop varieties. The city’s vibrant local cuisine displays creative combinations of ingredients and tastes, reflecting the diversity of the plentiful supply of fresh foods provided by the surrounding sea, fields and mountains. Local food culture, as manifested in the tastes and desires of the city’s people, has played an important role in the continuous cultivation and use of traditional vegetables, selected over the years for desired characteristics, as they were taking into themselves the very substance of the region’s soil and climate.
Public space is a literal commons: the common ground where people come together as friends, neighbors and citizens. Places we share together—parks, streets, sidewalks, squares, trails, markets, waterfronts, beaches, museums, community gardens, public buildings and more—are the primary sites for human exchange, upon which our communities, economy, democracy and society depend.
-Report: Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Was Man-Made
-Japan’s Unsatisfying Nuclear Report
-Reactor restarts, but Japan’s energy policy in flux
-Shadowlands – photographs & stories from Fukushima
My own favorite movement is called The Movement for Involuntary Complexity. The way it works is, nobody wants to join it, because it just doesn’t sound at all pleasant. But then people find out that they are part of it anyway.
-The ‘Monsanto Rider’: Are Biotech Companies About to Gain Immunity from Federal Law?
-Revolutionary Plots
-Grow your own: making Australian cities more food-secure
-What’s Cooking? the UK’s potential food crisis
-Can food save the high street? (audio)
– Very Local Food at “Frau Gerolds Garten” in Zürich
As many have argued, modern macroeconomics has proved itself spectacularly unsuited to anticipate and understand the crisis. This is no wonder, considering that the majority of models – including the macroeconometric models of the main central banks – treat money in an unrealistic textbook way and don’t even consider the existence of private banks, which, instead, are the major players in the process of creation and allocation of credit in the economy, as nef’s recent “Where does money come from?” brilliantly explains.
A thousand-year-old tradition of farming commons in southern England may be jeopardized as housing prices drive out farmers and render the commoning rights moot. Yes, there are still self-identified commoners in England. BBC radio recently interviewed a handful of the remaining commoners who rely upon the New Forest in Hampshire to feed their cattle, sheep and chickens. The 23-minute radio report focused on how the farming commons is a way of life that has preserved the distinctive ecological landscape – and how this future is now in doubt.
Kunstler has succinctly summed up the big picture for American healthcare. We are slapping bandaids on empire’s heart attack. I am revisiting healthcare reform for two reasons. First, healthcare’s complexity creates a good exercise in broadening our scale of view. Secondly, now that healthcare reform is law, the question is, what does this new law mean for individuals at the small scale, and for the country at the larger national scale?
After Copenhagen it was by no means obvious that simply calling upon governments to act would achieve very much. Yet the situation is urgent – so what do we do? The aim of this chapter is to look at options for getting from where we are now to adequate climate mitigation. It starts by looking at all the obstacles to getting things done – but this is not so that we get discouraged and give up. It is so that we are realistic and can find our way around the obstacles.
We think our lives should be fixed and stable, but they are not. We assume our friends should always be our friends, that we should keep our looks, our luck and our livelihoods. And yet life does not turn out that way. And in the extraordinary times we live in, it’s not supposed to either. We are fluid, changing, alchemical creatures, and many of the old structures we uphold, sometimes represented by people in our lives, have to be let go. The dark stuff we have inherited has to be transformed, It’s not the way we are trained to perceive the world, or ourselves; it’s not what our culture tells us is desirable, and yet it is our nature, and, some would say, our destiny at this point in time.
