Sharon Astyk

Always with the preps

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For many people, including the 24 dead, the storm was a disaster. Something good, however, can still come out of this — the realization that preparedness is not something you do occasionally when the weather forecasts a major storm, but something that becomes part of your life. Because otherwise, there is simply no way to be ready for the myriad of small disasters that happen in ordinary lives.

Ordeal – mulling the meaning of Rio+20

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Brown rice diets, asceticism and vows of silence and/or poverty have much in common with marathons, martial arts, the Aboriginal walkabout, and boot camp. The common theme is ordeal.

Each time we resolve to “never again” punish ourselves with such sacrifice, pain, fatigue and sweat, we wipe all that resolution away in the instant that we reach our goal, when we have our moment of light and love and ecstatic remembrance that this is what life is all about.

Perhaps the pain and disappointment of Rio+20 and all the other conferences that promised so much and delivered so little are mere ordeal, the prelude to the ultimate awakening.

Campagning with the Greens: the basic income delusion

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The proponents of basic income claim that we deserve it because our societies are so rich. The problem is that this richness does not come from nowhere. A part of it is the product of a a failing but still vigorous imperial system which transfers wealth and resources from the south to the north under threat of military force. Another part come from the frenetic overexploitation of non-renewable natural resources, which basically means we have stolen it from our descendants. For what is probably the most favored class in the whole human history, past and future, to claim it deserves to divert still more resources so as to be able to live well without contributing anything is pure unadulterated entitlement.

Local Dollars, Local Sense – (review)

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Michael Shuman’s latest book, Local Dollars, Local Sense is valuable for three different groups of readers: sustainability activists seeking to seeking financial support for small locally owned businesses; local business owners seeking start-up and expansion capital; and investors — both “accredited” and “unaccredited” — seeking to move their IRA accounts and other Wall Street holdings to safer, more profitable and more socially responsible and environmentally friendly investments.

Crafting Resilient Health Systems: An Introduction

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During the 20th century an indispensible yet unrecognized factor allowed the health sciences to attain dizzying levels of organizational complexity and achieve countless life saving and prolonging breakthroughs. The health professions drew upon ever-increasing amounts of human and natural resources, particularly energy…Therefore, the complexity of modern health systems and their accomplishments are an epiphenomenon of economic expansion made possible first and foremost by natural resources; only secondarily are they reflections of capital and labor expressed through human intelligence, drive and ingenuity. The era of cheap and plentiful energy is over and this has profound implications for the health sciences and modern world.

Growing beyond growth for true democracy

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“Growth” is, once again, the buzzword of the moment among Europe’s politicians, thanks to Francoise Hollande, the milquetoast Socialist recently elected to succeed Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France. “My mission now,” Hollande told supporters on the night of his electoral victory, “is to give European construction a growth dimension.” President Obama praised Holland at Camp David, telling reporters he would urge “other G8 leaders” to adopt a “strong growth agenda.” The previous buzzword, “austerity,” is meanwhile in decline.

Some Transition reflections on George Monbiot’s announcement that “we were wrong on peak oil”

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George Monbiot announced in the Guardian on Monday “We were wrong on peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all”, an article which concluded “peak oil hasn’t happened, and it’s unlikely to happen for a very long time”. Several people have written, and even stopped me while I’ve been out shopping, to ask for my take on his piece, so here it is. It has been a tricky thing to write, as in the time it took me to compose it, so many other interesting analyses of it have been posted, many of which I have tried to reference here…What he does prompt is a rethink in terms of how we present peak oil.

The wrong kind of magic

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Carl Jung and his physicist friend Wolfgang Pauli suggested in a too rarely read 1952 book that synchronicity—an “acausal connecting principle,” to use Jung’s carefully phrased description—brought events that occur at the same time into a relationship of unexpected meaning. Whether or not they were right in general, there are times when synchronicities arrive with all the subtlety of a cold wet mackerel across the face, and last Friday was one of those.