Activism

Bless Bolivia for recharging the fight to rescue our climate

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Maybe we’ll get a jolt of political energy from the south, courtesy of the groups and leaders assembling from across the world in Cochabamba, Bolivia. This People’s Summit on Climate Change will be seen as naive by precisely the kind of people applauding the president for turning on the oil spigots today–after all, its by definition a People’s Summit, free from the kind of corporate interference that helped sink the Copenhagen conference in December.

The breakdown of politics, continued

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One of the pleasures of blogging is that the dialogue which it sometimes provokes, and my recent post reflecting on the health care vote and the apparent breakdown of ‘normal’ political processes produced a couple of thoughtful responses which seemed to me to take the discussion on.

Gaviotas: Village of Hope

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We first learned about Gaviotas, the legendary sustainable Colombian village, in 2004, while working in our home state, New Mexico. The two of us helped found a group called La Mesita, “the small table,” composed of three educators, a renewable energy scientist, a water-rights attorney, and a community organizer. We decided to start a project that would involve teenagers in organic agriculture and renewable energy in Ribera, a rural village in the north of the state. We believed that reviving northern New Mexico’s agricultural and cultural traditions could help the region confront both its environmental crises, like unsustainable water use, and its deepening social problems, such as rural drug abuse and teen pregnancy.

Fear and loathing in Ohio

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The passage of health care reform legislation in the House of Representatives last weekend was met with such a crescendo of hyperbole and vitriol on both sides of the political aisle that even William Shatner thought, "Jeez, tone down the theatrics.” … If Koch and others are feeding fear to protect the profits of health insurers, just imagine the kind of fomenting we’ll see when the stakes are even higher—when the energy and climate crises come front and center in the national debate.

Where Dark Green Meets Cleantech (Or, Beyond Shades of Green)

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A little while ago, Alex Steffen of World Changing offered a critique of the permaculture-inspired Transition Towns initiative–a grass-roots, peak oil/climate change adaptation movement that has gone viral around the world in the past three years . . . Steffen would describe these people as “dark greens,” a brand of environmentalist who emphasizes local community action but can tend toward collapse-thinking or doomerism.

Requiem for a dying city

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Unions, very much like the bulk of the population, are still trapped in this ideology of perpetual progress, yet cannot help noticing the continuous degradation of most people’s living conditions. The result of this cognitive dissonance between the grandiose expectations of the ideology of progress and the bleak reality, is a curious combination of helplessness, despair and anger..