Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Dmitry Orlov John Michael Greer, Sharon Astyk and Rob Hopkins have made some interesting points on the topic of community, and I wish to join the fray. In all of my experience, communities — of people and animals — form instantaneously and rather effortlessly, based on a commonality of interests and needs.
Organizing: Movement, Community, Pressure Group?
Greer begins with a serious confusion when he conflates “community”, “movement” and “pressure group”. He is talking about movement building, not community building, when he references the Grange or civil rights.
-Fear of the poor is hampering Haiti rescue
-Why The US Owes Haiti Billions – The Briefest History
-Senegal offers land to Haitians
-Year 501: The Tragedy of Haiti
-Haiti: a long descent to hell
Peak oil will force us to acquire new knowledge and skills – The Great Reskilling. These “new” skills are often old skills that our grandparents took for granted. In this spirit, “my” ecovillage-to-be organized three courses this past summer on Building with natural materials, Permaculture Design and Local Economic Regeneration.
A weekdly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Record Asian demand
-The Alberta oil sands
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
-Emissions from UK food industry far higher than believed
-Poachers Arrive at Egg Farms
-Striking a bargain: With supply limited, state targets water demand
-Will Anyone Stand Up For American Industry?
-The Key to Local Food Systems’ Survival: Strong Community Support
‘Eco’ packaging
-Google defies Chinese censors after cyberattacks on Gmail accounts of activists
-Public Produce: Filling the Sidewalks with Fruit Trees
-As the World Burns
-Movie Review Friday: The Road
-A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic
-Photo Gallery: Homes for a Changing Climate
Had Noah built his ark and the Great Flood never materialized, he would have felt very, very silly indeed! Noah could thank God for such an accurate weather forecast. In the biblical story, once the waters receded, God told Noah that there won’t be any more Great Floods, and some of us may still find comfort in this bit of divine dispensation, but rising ocean levels are a fact that more and more of us will be forced to take into account as we redraw our coastal maps.
In one of my favorite non-science fiction novels, “Freddy and Fredericka“, the future King and Queen of England are dropped naked from an airplane into America as sort of a rite of passage. Though heir to the throne and infinitely wealthy back home, Freddy must use only his wits, skills of persuasion and physical abilities to somehow rise to the unlikely position of the leader of the USA – if he manages this, basically from scratch, he will then have earned the throne of England not only due to hereditary decree but via his own merits.
William Morris offered a radical vision that sounds very much like the radical vision of those now proposing the relocalization of human society in response to the myriad challenges we face to our very survival as a species.
The American press probably hardly noticed but southern France has experienced a major blackout around Christmas and in my own region – Brittany – local authorities have urged people to reduce their power consumption, lest the whole regional grid catastrophically fail. The lights are still on in the small Breton village I am writing this from, but it is probably a matter of time before they go off.
John Michael Greer has a superb piece up about our reluctance to seriously consider real community and organizational strategies. I think it is well worth reading for anyone interested in this question of community – because we have to ask ourselves, if this is the tool we’ve got, why do so few of us want to do the work? Why are so few of us able to do the work?
