Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Jan Spencer Benicia, California, is set to lose its largest single employer and source of tax revenue, a sprawling oil refinery. A Guardian article about this issue catalyzed this essay that describes what a thoughtful process might look like, if a community – any community – chose to pursue sustainability instead of economic growth.
We’d love you to follow our exciting journey into the specifics and challenges of vertically micro-manufacturing the first bioregional, ecological UK linen in decades!
Humans only fool themselves to believe they can do any better than ecology. We can’t expect to invent substitutes via cognitive processes: it’s never worked that way, and our attempt is proving to be a colossal flop in a mere 10,000 years.
If we take back control of our food and our water we stop environmental degradation. We cannot do it alone. But we can do it within a community.
It’s curious that money trauma hasn’t gone into the mainstream yet. It’s one of the most fundamental forces shaping how we move around in our lives, and yet it remains incredibly taboo.
The gap between the beckoning future of an ecocivilization and today’s grim reality is only too clear. But to the extent that meaningful hope does arise, it emerges from the very ruptures of our present breakdown. As the weave of our dominant system unravels, possibilities emerge to reweave our societal fabric into a new design.
In the end, proforestation offers us a choice about who we wish to become. We can continue to treat forests as instruments to repair a damaged atmosphere, pulling them into our orbit as another tool in a human-centred project. Or we can accept their invitation to live differently: to slow down, to restrain ourselves, to share space and time with other beings whose existence does not revolve around us.
In this episode, Nate offers a personal reflection on the unfolding geopolitical tensions surrounding the Strait of Hormuz, beginning with an examination of how disruptions to fossil fuel flows propagate through the global economy, but with a time lag.
Even as we say a bittersweet farewell to Simone and Kristin and close this chapter of Resilience, we are excited to open the next chapter and welcome Shantal Otchere as our new managing editor.
There are many answers, and maybe none are completely right. But some of them are better than others. You find something that works for you and your land because you kept working at it. That is what most advice leaves out, and that is where the real work is.
Mainstream coverage of off-grid, self-sustaining communities like the one featured in this video tends to be glib and sensational (focusing, for example, on “trash homes”). It’s so much rarer to see in-depth coverage of the full social, technical and ecological aspects of such communities, or intimate glimpses into residents’ daily lives and motivations.
Since stories serve in every culture as the workshops of meaning, the urge to craft new ones may signal our readiness at long last to face up to what’s coming. All stories have characters. The qualities we attach to the ones in leading roles and the fates that befall them as plots unfold tell us a great deal about what we fear and what we value.
