Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tad Patzek How naive it is to think than the “New Green Deal” will allow us to continue our current lifestyles, just by other greener means. This, my friends in the developed, power and resource hogging countries is impossible.
“Fortunately,” he says, “we here in California believe in climate change. We believe in the ecology of our land. We believe that we can make the positive changes that need to be made so that we have life on this planet.” And not only life, but a good life.
I suspect that the warning we’ve received from Mother Nature this year about the vulnerability of our agricultural system will go unheeded. If we were smart, we would be reorganizing the whole kit and caboodle around small-scale operations in localized foodsheds. It wouldn’t be rocket science. But it wouldn’t be making Cargill, Tyson and Monsanto rich.
Being present in the now, connecting with nature, knowing you’re doing all you can to heal Gaia and prepare yourself and your community for the transition that is coming, and avoiding the bits of modernity that foment anxiety: all of that will help reorient you, dulling the anxiety and helplessness you feel, strengthening your sense of self and purpose and hopefully helping you to stay committed to using your life energy to heal the planet that you are part of and utterly depend on.
“Yes, this is coming apart,, We have to reckon with the grief. We have to reckon with the anger. We have to reckon with the fear. And we have to know that deep inside we actually have power and agency, and we can make a difference. When it’s a fight for your life, you’re willing to throw down, especially if you are doing it in a community together.”
In my vision we see farming as landscape management and food is based on the landscape diet, i.e. that you eat food from the landscape you live in. Communities are jointly deciding on major principles of how the landscape is managed and take responsibility for that farmers can do their job in a good way – and eat the stuff from that land.
While local currencies more generally see such vast application and have the potential to help the lives of such diverse groups, there’s evidently a lot of questions still to be answered when it comes to the function of local currencies in slum settings.
That’s why, to counter fascist violence, we need to offer a better future, not simply more of the status quo. Confronted with the politics of hate, it’s all the more necessary to set a course on hope.
The conversation you hear about the environment on CNN is not the conversation taking place in college dorms or outdoors clubs or in community centers or on farms or in the heads of those who hope and fight and when they sleep they dream of mountain air and when they close their eyes at work for just a moment are no further removed from the ocean than the fish who swim in it. And they are getting louder.
Despite its popularity among cutting-edge thinkers and designers, a low-tech lifestyle is hardly avant garde. The majority of the human population lives and has always lived with less advanced technology than most modern Westerners do.
Wishful thinking is a powerful emotion. That’s why the media and the public love a good news story like this and don’t ask too many questions. We really wish we had a magic wand to wave that pesky CO2 away…
Falling energy use and surging offshore wind are among the trends revealed in the latest round of government figures on the energy flowing through the UK.
