Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Jake Marble With over a decade-and-a-half of American schooling under my belt, I feel that I can assert with absolute certainty that there are some fundamental flaws in how we have chosen to structure education.
Many traditional cultures prove that it is possible to sustain locally adapted, place-based communities for centuries and even millennia through prudent and ecologically and socially responsible resource management and sustainable ways to meet human needs within the limits and opportunities set by the natural conditions of their particular region.
The Santa Cruz River was once the lifeblood of Tucson, Arizona. Due to heavy development and groundwater overdraft, it hasn’t seen year-round flow in 70 years. The city plans to revive the storied desert river with recycled effluent.
The buildings of eco-communities shape many communities’ functions. As Jan Martin Bang argues, “we are what we live in. When we plan our buildings, we are also planning what kind of society we want to create…we make the buildings and the buildings make us.”
Under the updated SEC rules, which went into effect in 2009, drillers can count oil and gas from wells that won’t be drilled or fracked for up to five years as part of their proved reserves. Those as-yet-untapped wells can be put on a company’s books as a subset of their “proved” reserves, listed under the label “proved undeveloped” reserves.
It had been 10 long years of fighting, but even a decade wouldn’t age or persuade the women to put down their stones, or to keep Amelia’s tongue in her mouth, to silence her words in a language that wasn’t her own.
Thanks to Rob for his reply to my recent thoughts on the Transition Towns movement. Here are some brief notes in response.
Growth is the social glue that has held liberal industrial societies together, which is one of several connected reasons why we won’t address our relationship to our natural ecology by becoming “more liberal” or “more progressive.” Sustainability, then, is neither liberal nor progressive.
LVPSC brings together about 30 groups and organisations working in various sectors on the island under the banner of peacebuilding and sustainability work. Through working together they are able to support smaller groups, have access to peacebuilding and ecological trainings, and widen their reach both on the island and in wider Kenya.
Radical municipalism is the idea that we can build popular assemblies and neighborhood councils, where people learn to manage their common life through face-to-face politics and develop the skills and the power to seize control: to take the city.
And the big picture? Despite 25 years of global climate policy-making, decarbonisation rates are not even close to what is required.
Weston Price observed that our ancestors would make a lot of effort to enable their bodies to re-build rather than only to supply energy.
