Ecological Food Conference sold out again
The fact that record numbers of people are coming to the meetings of insurgent garden-farm groups all over is sweet music to those of us who have been part of this revolution from the beginning.
Gene Logsdon
The Power of the Permablitz
The permablitz is a short but intense transfer of beneficial energy where members of the community come together to implement a project or landscape installation designed to provide more resources or energy than it consumes, commonly a permaculture design. Operating on a give-help-and-then-be-helped basis, these fun-filled and informative events overcome many of the pronounced barriers facing individuals for implementing regenerative designs and structures.
Review: Localisation and Resilience by Rob Hopkins
The dissertation is a case study of the first official Transition Town, the English market town of Totnes, long a popular tourist destination known for its alternative culture. Using interviews, focus groups, questionnaire surveys and other social science research methods, the study examines the degree to which the Transition ideals of localization and resilience have become a reality in Totnes. (Transitioners endorse a number of upbeat definitions of a resilient community, a popular one being “[a] culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its own limits, and able to thrive for having done so.”*)
Community asset ownership 1: an interview with Sara Neuff of Coin Street Community Builders
If a community owns its assets, then the community itself can decide what’s important within that community and it’s not subject to the vagaries of say, changes in local government, changes in government funding even –for example, the times we’re in at the moment. All of those things mean that you can actually keep going regardless of the chaos around you, you can control your own situation and earn your own money and deliver your own balance of business in that way.
WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump enough oil to keep a lid on prices
US diplomat convinced by Saudi expert that reserves of world’s biggest oil exporter have been overstated by nearly 40%
[excerpts]
Corporate control? Not in these communities
These communities are adopting laws that, taken together, are forming an alternative structure to the global corporate economy. The principles behind these laws can be applied broadly to any area where corporate rights override local self-government or the well-being of the local ecology.
To ‘Frack’ or not to ‘Frack’?
Ohio, the home of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and site of the world’s largest oil-producing provinces in the late 19th century, is again at the center of the action in domestic fossil fuel production as a controversial drilling technique, known as fracking, is draining Ohio’s remaining oil and gas reserves. With global oil production peaking and the number of new large oil finds dwindling, is increased domestic production in Ohio and other states through fracking a vital contribution to our energy security, or a fate to be fought?
Transition footwear
I’ve been wearing my boots all over L.A. these days (the ankle is slowly getting better). At first it felt kind of werrd — big boots that really didn’t go with anything but garden jeans. But there’s a solidness to the clump-clump-clump they make. These things mean business. They’re for going out and getting some serious work done. They’re the shoes of a producer, not a consumer. And I’m proud to be wearing ’em.
Transition initiatives and resilience – Part 1
To understand the Transition Movement requires understanding the significance and broadness of the word resilience as the movement uses it. It may be that many Transition supporters are assuming the common definition and are content with it, unaware of the more complex meanings. If so, this could be problematic later.
Book review: “The Tyranny of Oil” by Antonia Juhasz
Before we can hope to prepare the US for climate change and peak oil, Antonia Juhasz says citizens can and must break the power of Big Oil in Washington. Until we dislodge America’s “oiligarchy,” any plan to ramp up clean energy and conservation is doomed to fail. Oil may be the most powerful industry on Earth, but Juhasz thinks that if we break up Exxon, Chevron and the other oil majors in the style of Standard Oil, AT&T or Enron, we take bring Big Oil back down to a manageable size and take back America’s energy future.
Water – Feb 7
– Water: On Women’s Burdens, Humans’ Rights, and Companies’ Profits
– Peak Water: What Is it — and Are We There Yet?
– Scientists warn California could be struck by winter ‘superstorm’
A patch of somewhere else
When people list history’s most world-changing inventions, they usually include fire, or guns, or computers. Rarely do people mention something so ubiquitous to us that it has become, literally, invisible – glass and transparent plastic. In the Renaissance, though, when glass began to be sheeted and shaped in quantity and with skill, it created a boom in civilisation; microscopes and telescopes opened up the breadth of the world to science, spectacles doubled men’s intellectual lifetime, and windows allowed for the creation of the first greenhouses.
