Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rachel Lalchan It’s been over 13 months since we shopped in a large, intense, brightly lit, empire of grocery consumerism and I’m happy to report that life sans supermarket is not only viable but quite wonderful! With no intention of going back, I hope you will consider quitting too!
Nothing sets me off more than people who portray Transition town folk as a bunch of happy clappy, ‘we just vision it and it will happen’ eco activists. Last night’s EGM of TRESOC (Totnes Renewable Energy Society) was a delightful, difficult, heart warming, and frustrating exploration of unknown territory; raw Transition in Action. It was a good example of what happens when a project moves from the great idea phase into real decision involving, in this case, significant sums of money, within a community…Although last night I think we emerged intact, more or less. It is what happens when a community expresses its will grounded in a positive vision- amazing things can happen.
So far, we are on course for full-force collision. The fundamental problems with our monetary and financial systems have not been addressed, but only papered over. The latest excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s new book ‘The End of Growth’.
Clive Hamilton has been researching energy and its problems for years. But judging by his book on why the world’s governments have failed to slow industrial society’s slide towards climate disaster, Hamilton is either willfully ignorant of peak oil, or too scared to talk about it. But like too many people who care about climate change, he’s only getting half the story — and helping to handicap the climate movement in the process.
In my last post, I looked at the Internet’s energy use, broadly construed, and contended that we might offload other societal functions onto the Internet. In this post I’d like to consider in what ways that might be an unwise approach given the dependencies of the Internet.
A midweekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Developments this week
The new book GWR: The Global Warming Reader leaves a reader wondering why, given the evidence, there’s not a robust movement to replace the causes of the warming. But the situation is unlike any other that’s arisen, and our historical models of resistance or mobilization may mislead us. Many of these differences are painfully apparent to those trying to build a movement; in the aggregate they are daunting and suggest the need for some additional tactics, including a kind of initiation.
While many impacts of the recession are tragic, these are the pains of adjusting to a new reality: the end of growth. They are a necessary part of a temporary phase. We might call it the cocoon phase, as we metamorphose into something more beautiful.
A lot of people blame fast buck artists for bringing on the 2008 economic crash, but few have yet looked to slow money artistry to get the economy moving in a better direction.
To resist the attempts of those who seek to drag yet more wealth away from ordinary people to fill the coffers of those who brought us the financial crisis, we need to clarify our understanding of how the system as a whole is changing and needs to change, fast; and create the spaces for prefiguring the kind of society we want.
Lost in the furor over the debt crisis last week came the news that the U.S. economy expanded at an annual rate of only 0.4 percent in the first quarter and 1.3 percent in the second. As these numbers were well below what economists were expecting, the revelation that the US was not coming out of the “great recession” was quite a shock for those who have not been paying attention.
-How a community farm for London could end ‘madness of flying and shipping in food’
-The truth about the global demand for food
-The Permaculture Movement Grows From Underground
-Cooking with California Food in K-12 Schools
-British farmers forced to pay the cost of supermarket price wars
