Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Olga Bonfiglio Richard Heinberg came to Kalamazoo recently and his talk was the first peak oil discussion I’ve heard that didn’t discourage and depress me. Actually, I felt both inspired and energized to help create the next major era in our world’s history.
– America is suffering a power outage (and the rest of the world knows it)
– 15 shocking facts show that the middle class is being wiped out
– In New Orleans, kindness trumped chaos
– Watch Colbert’s statement before Congress on migrant farmworkers
– Colbert annoys press corps … again
– Food fight: a Kol Nidre call for sustainable consumption
– From vacant city lots to food on the table
– What psychology can teach us about our response to climate change
– Facebook – unfriend coal
– Rocky Mountain dust-up: runoff’s dirty secret
– Arctic ice in death spiral
– Localism vs globalism: two world views collide
– MarketWatch: The economy can’t grow forever
– A case for singletasking
We can strengthen our communities and ourselves to prepare for the uncertain world of failing economies, climate change, and oil depletion.
We [in Cuba] have indeed implemented a mass campaign to conserve energy, but I don’t believe that there exists a deep change in our policies or mentality in this same sense.
Some of the things we try, in an effort to re-localize our lives, will yield a bumper crop. Some will put on lots of leaves but no fruit. Others will refuse to germinate at all, no matter what we do. That’s why diversity is so bloody important, mono-culturists be damned.
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. “
“A school has to be more than beautiful and ‘green.’ It has to respect students’ dignity, and feel like a safe and peaceful place where people care.”
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.
"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.
