Brent Blackwelder

The next President’s inaugural speech (if only…)

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Once upon a time the United States was a global pioneer of democracy and justice. The founders of this great nation articulated a noble vision of inalienable rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Times have changed. We have emerged from this presidential campaign with an ignoble vision of alienating wrongs — venom, vitriol, and the pursuit of pettiness. The campaign, including my campaign, dodged the most important issue of our era: coming to grips with the ecological reality confronting life on this planet. Today I pledge to make our nation once again the leader in solving economic, environmental, and social crises.

Reflections on my Reconomy roadtrip: Big challenges and big possibilities

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“Road trip” sounds better, but it was of course a rail trip, taking in 10 places over 1,500 miles in 22 train legs in 11 days – from Totnes to Maidenhead, Lewes, Brixton, Norwich, Durham, Dunbar nr Edinburgh, Slaithwaite, Manchester and Hereford then back to Devon…I finish my roadtrip inspired and enthused by the fledgling local economic work that I have seen. It’s planting the seeds of a new local economy and providing extensive learning opportunities. The power of this work so far, as well as providing some jobs for people of course, is that it’s starting to change the story about our economy.

Study: Extreme weather hammers global food system

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A new report released Wednesday says that the full impact of climate change and extreme weather events on global food prices is being underestimated and warns that without a more acute understanding of how global warming threatens agricultural systems and economies, governments will be unable to prepare for future disasters.

Weeds that like a sip of Roundup now and then

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First the glorious days of advanced farming brought us corn stalks that eat tractor tires. Now there’s a weed that likes to drink weed killers, especially Roundup. Recently Palmer amaranth “completely overran” most of the soybean test plots at Bayer CropScience’s test plots in Illinois, in the words of DTN/Progressive Farmer editor, Pam Smith, despite having an arsenal of herbicides thrown at it. She describes some of the plots as “forests of pigweed.” I shouldn’t joke about this because it really is a serious problem, but I just can’t help it.

Sol Food Mobile Farm: Leading the food justice movement to your backyard

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The crew of Sol Mobile Farm is bringing new meaning to the term “food movement.” In June 2012, the team of four started on a sixth month trip. They would travel, they decided, from North Carolina, up the East Coast, over to the West Coast, down to the South, and then back again in a 57 passenger red school bus.

Game over? Or overtime?

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As we reported two years ago, an international group of scientists, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group has been sailing into the Arctic waters around Norway and Russia to take samples of methane bubbling from ocean clathrates frozen methane deposits on the sea floor. Some of their findings, very preliminary, are now making their way into the blogosphere, but like many, we await peer-review published articles or discussion in the next IPCC report – AR5 – due in 2014, before we draw hard conclusions.

when the left hand knows what the right hand is doing

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Transition groups sometimes meet with the understanding that somewhere in the woolly future “the community” will engage in energy descent. However when you put your own highly consumptive lives under the microscope, the kind of double think and denial that allows Transitioners to talk passionately, for example, about peak oil but still take planes, could no longer happen.

A summer of extremes signifies the new normal

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This summer has seen record heat waves and wildfires in the U.S, the worst flooding in Beijing’s modern history, and droughts that devastated the U.S. corn crop and led India to set up “refugee camps” for livestock. These extreme events were not freak occurrences – this is how the Earth works now.

The empty nest

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It has been a long time since I posted here, with many changes. As initiator of Transition action in Los Angeles, and one of the original circle that created the Transition Los Angeles city hub (TLA), I’ve been doing a bit of the “empty nest” syndrome myself. For successful initiators in large areas worldwide, this too is part of the natural and evolving Transition journey of building local community. The empty nest phenomenon is something I haven’t seen discussed much.