Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gloria Flora The ability to create artificial environments (air conditioning, heating, lighting) and chemically alter natural materials (processed food, plastic) perhaps gives the illusion that humans are capable of meeting their needs with minimal imputs from nature. The flawed logic suggests that if humans are only tangentially dependent on the natural world, functioning ecosystems lose importance.
The recent report from World Wildlife Fund insisting that the world can transition to renewable energy while maintaining current developed world lifestyles and abolishing Third World poverty is simply one more in a long series of loudly heralded cornucopian fantasies well detached from the hard realities of the industrial world’s predicament. The sheer amounts of cheap energy that modern civilization has to hand has blinded too many people to the fact that “vast” and “infinite” are not synonyms — and that blindness has significant implications for the near future.
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.”*)
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.
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?
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.
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.
US diplomat convinced by Saudi expert that reserves of world’s biggest oil exporter have been overstated by nearly 40%
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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.
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.
Would my closet be in danger of unsustainable growth headed for collapse? I could not tell yet whether my new obsession, despite having been a doorway to my intuitive self, would prove to be a distraction from serious spiritual work or money making endeavors. Sometimes you just get what you need.
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.
