Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Gene Logsdon People in Monet’s day saw much more than just the beauty of a haystack when they looked at one. They saw survival. As long as haystacks dotted the horizon every fall, society knew that it would survive until the next growing season. I wonder if even today, people look at those hay bales dotting a field and instinctively realize the same thing.
It is tempting to despair of all action. And sometimes those who despair are right. But sometimes they aren’t. And this, I think is an important and central point for everyone who hits those moments when they simply don’t believe society will self-correct in any measure from its impending ecological disaster. I should be clear – I don’t believe it will self-correct in every measure, or even as much as I wish desperately it would. But I also do not believe that what one does to mitigate suffering, soften impacts, make life livable or plan for a better outcome is wasted.
A month into BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe, the US press began to say that the crisis might be ‘Obama’s 9/11’. It was a comparison that Obama himself repeated a couple of weeks later. Hyperbole? Perhaps – but the disaster certainly opens up space for thinking about alternatives to the industry that created it.
-The Erosion of America’s Middle Class
-Death by Growth: What the Climate-Bill Autopsies Missed
-The Federal Reserve Enters Decline
-Deflation and you: Acting perfectly sensibly
-Forget the ‘big society’; we just need a co-operative one
-Chinese scholar: Will Chinese workers challenge global capitalism
In the main section of the Lederer Youth Garden in northeast Washington D.C., run by the DC Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR), a staff member pulled up a weed from the rows of okra, peppers, and watermelons. “This will sell for 3 dollars a bunch at the farmers market,” he said. “But here in our garden, we consider it a weed.” Looking on, Yao Afantchao, who works with the University of the District of Columbia’s (UDC) cooperative extension service and its agricultural experimentation service, smiled and shook his head. On just the other side of the Lederer Garden’s green house, the small demonstration garden he manages boasts an entire section dedicated to growing this weed.
I have been visiting A2R Farms outside of Corvallis Oregon all year. They are a former conventional grass seed farm transitioning to organic seed crops, primarily for local distribution. I watched as they planted the fields and as the crops grew–flax, chick peas, sunflowers and wheat. And as harvest season approached I looked over at the combines and asked my friend Clinton Lindsey, “Which one am I driving?”
For Gulf residents, the BP oil spill has made the problem of unchecked corporate power painfully clear. Exxon Valdez survivor Riki Ott on why this may be the moment to overcome our political divides and take back our democracy.
While North gives a good overview of the most sophisticated portions of the local-finance spectrum, he is writing about local money, not community finances in general. The scope of his book does not include the low-hanging-fruit — the easy to set up, free to establish vehicles which hold enormous community-building potential. Group purchasing, garden sharing, carpooling, tool libraries, seed swaps, barter fairs and more – these fill in the most intimate, colorful portion of the spectrum in the vision of a multifaceted local financial infrastructure.
Could a system of energy rationing, or even rationing of high energy goods and foods work in the US? The conventional answer is that it is politically impossible to even consider it, and that the public would never go along with it. But a closer look at the history of rationing during the second World War suggests that it might not be so unthinkable, and that in fact, rationing has historically been viewed as highly positive, pro-democratic and good public policy by the general populace.
As America adjusts to the New Reality of tight credit, chronically less-affordable energy, high unemployment rates, rising levels of homelessness, and steeply declining tax revenues, new strategies will be needed to help swelling ranks of low-income people adjust and adapt. National policies designed to ease credit, lower mortgage rates, or provide basic financial assistance (including extended unemployment benefits) may help over the short term, but over the longer term many needs will be better met locally by largely volunteer-driven non-profit organizations, co-ops, and hybrid public-private agencies and programs.
The 12 Ingredients for Transition encourage us to “build a bridge to local government.” I used to think that “building bridges” was lovely British poetic language, but recently I’m learning how that pretty phrase brings with it some fairly serious guidance.
I have recently written that we live according to the Law Of Civilization And Decay, which can be succinctly summarized: what goes up must come down. Just like balls thrown up into the air, civilizations ascend and then fall as though there were some kind of “historical gravity” at work. America is not (and will not be) an exception.
