Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Many proposed responses to the crisis of industrial society focus on drafting plans for a new society in advance. Is this as sensible as it seems, or do we need to approach the future before us in a more improvisational way?
How the new racial landscape of America meets the Green movement, increasing the visibility of both.
With Transition, many people encounter the model, the tools, the Network, and enter what we might call ‘Super Exuberance Mode’, where they feel they have found the One Thing That Will Save Us. Over time, this then calms down, and they become more realistic and grounded, but although that early stage is a powerful experience for many, it also has its inherent dangers.
If President-elect Obama’s team does not get a hefty dose of energy reality, they are likely to make very poor strategic decisions. For instance, in the light of peak oil, is bailing out the dinosaur US auto makers the right thing to do?
With significant Democratic gains in Congress, Obama will have an opportunity to sign more significant energy-related legislation than we’ve seen since Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Will it be enough to prevent an energy-driven depression following the present economic turmoil?
We are facing a deep crisis – our economy is simply falling apart, while our ecology and the underlying source of our economic power – our energy supply – is threatened. And Obama is coming to us, like Lincoln, like Roosevelt, at a moment in which the easy solutions to these crises are no longer possible.
As the drama of the bursting bubble of Wall St. gives way to a slower, but steady and painful, economic decline, the first and most important question we should ask is “Should we try to blow another bubble, or should we reject bubble culture values for something entirely different?”
Jay Hanson interview (dieoff.com creator)
Why fungibility matters
Once again: ‘The myth of the Tragedy of the Commons’
Capitalist and socialist responses to the ecological crisis
Deer hunting with Jesus: Joe Bageant interview
Seismic shifts in the political landscape
A scary Halloween with Sarah Palin
Stiglitz: Reversal of fortune
Obama lays plans to deaden expectation after election victory
The Senate and the union hall: Where American climate policy will succeed or fail
2008 is the year of a triple shock: the global food crisis (which made the realities of food-insecurity palpable), the global oil-price rise (which put localised transition on the agenda as never before) and the global financial hurricane (which gave the state as agent a new lease of political life). The long-term consequences can at present be only dimly discerned. [Discussion of leftism and localization]
Edward Carpenter: a pioneering open democrat
A 21st-century battle we must win for all the world’s sake
Consuming anxiety
Turning a corner (on peak oil)
Sharon Astyk: What I’d like to have been able to say to New York Times readers
Where’s FDR when you need him?
Hoping for a new New Deal
On Robert S. McElvaine’s “The Great Depression”
Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
Karl Marx’s guide to the end of capitalism: a primer
Eric Hobsbawm on the crisis
