Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Eric Utne It’s time to transcend issue-oriented politics and build community… “I felt that I was glimpsing the future of community organizing in America—organizing based not on hot-button issues, but on building relationships through deep personal sharing and active listening. “
"Mining’s Final Frontier" takes a golly-this-could-be-really-neato look at underwater mining. That’s right…underwater mining. As in smashing the seafloor to pieces, sucking it up, then filtering for precious metals. China and Canada are all over it like monkeys on an overturned trailer full of bananas as they, and many other nations line up to be the first to "smash and suck" their way to their God-given share of the earth’s bounty.
-Prospects for a viable food future
-Introducing the Permaculture Designers’ Manual, Chapter 1: Introduction to Permaculture
-Why We Need a New Green Revolution to Stop Hunger
-Food Sovereignty: Reconnecting Food, Nature and Community
-UN warned of major new food crisis at emergency meeting in Rome
What do you call a lawyer who helps people share, cooperate, barter, foster local economies, and build sustainable communities?
The future can be a scary place. For many people, not being able to imagine a lower carbon world is a huge impediment to designing and realising it. If our communities suffer from a similar collective failure of the imagination, Transition will be impossible.
Chip Haynes, longtime online peak oil writer, has taken the unusual step of creating a beginner’s guide, broken down into 101 chapters of between 400 and 500 words. With at least one cheesy gag in each chapter.
If everyone installs woodburning stoves, might we end up back in the age of smogs? Are we better to explore group solutions, anaerobic digestion for example, which might still be able to supply us with gas (albeit to far more efficient homes than at present) or other large scale renewables, rather than all fracturing down into small off-the-grid bubbles?
-How to Get People Out of Their Cars
-The data problem that holds back climate action and smart growth
-Bicycle – The Freedom Machine
Our ancestors experienced the myriad relationships involved in food production on a small, local scale. Until recently, we had lost that sense of relationship-an awareness, however fleeting, that the most heartfelt food chain is not the biological one, but the one that connects us with the community of life on earth.
A midweek roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
It’s only in imaginary worlds — like those inhabited by today’s mainstream economists, for example — that every animal you will deal with as a gardener is a source of value to you. The key to dealing with those that aren’t, once again, starts with a grasp of the principles of ecology. The Archdruid explains.
In America, the spiritual journey starts with an active, conscious, personal rejection of I Consume, Therefore I Am. Life is precious, but new shoes, especially when you’ve already got perfectly adequate footware, are not.
