May East

Unleashing of the first Transition slum with rap and samba

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It was a sizzling Saturday morning in December when members of the low low-income Brasilândia community of 247.000 people in São Paulo, gathered with great expectancy for the official unleashing of ‘Transixion’ Brasilândia. Led by the initiating group created earlier in May with representatives from the arts community, environmental groups, health workers, educators, local authority and members of Stickel Foundation, the first part of the morning was dedicated to celebrate a remarkable chain of achievements.

Peak Moment 186: Your money, your life, your happiness

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People examine their assumptions about money, decide what is “Enough,” get out of debt, and free up life energy to invest in what matters most to them. Vicki discusses applying these same tools to relationships with our time, opportunities for creativity and exchange, building community, and her ten-mile food diet.

Peak oil and a changing climate

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The scientific community has long agreed that our dependence on fossil fuels inflicts massive damage on the environment and our health, while warming the globe in the process. But beyond the damage these fuels cause to us now, what will happen when the world’s supply of oil runs out? In a new video series from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and other scientists, researchers and writers explain.

31 Books – The Resilient Gardener

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It is rare for me to read a book that does all three things – that fills that middle gap by offering me genuinely new and engaging ideas, is local to its place but thoughtful about how information gleaned in one environment might connect to another, is written by someone who does have limits on time and energy and occasionally desire to do it perfectly, and finally, is conscious of the need to garden in response to difficult times. That’s why Carol Deppe’s _The Resilient Gardener_ is such a gift.

They’ll serve cocktails at the oil crash

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Douglas Coupland’s vision of an oil-crisis apocalypse in his novel “Player One” is so frightening because it seems so plausible. Would you like to be holed up in a tacky cocktail lounge of an airport hotel when oil hits $250 a barrel, the planes stop flying and the power goes out? And that’s just the beginning.

The tarpaper shack principle

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Plenty of proposals for dealing with the end of the age of cheap oil assume tacitly that energy and resources will be available for massive new projects. Since shortages of energy and resources are precisely what’s at issue just now, this is at least open to question. A less speculative approach might start with those technologies that can be made on a less lavish basis — say, the resources available in a 1930s Hooverville, of the sort many of us may be inhabiting before too long. The Archdruid suggests one example.

Building collaborative lifestyles

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A recent study found that a quarter of people have no one to turn to in times of crisis, and another quarter have only one person. The growing effort to build a collaborative culture can help change that — particularly the new technology available for neighborhoods, technology that allows people to share with each other.

Innovation of the week: Cultivating health, community and solidarity

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GardenAfrica, a non-profit organization in southern Africa that helps families and communities establish organic gardens in small private plots, schools, hospitals and other public areas, prefers that its work be described as solidarity rather than charity. “Charity is all too often about externally imposed solutions, solidarity is a partnership of equals,” says its website.