Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“Because money talks and BS walks, if the hydrogen economy was an apprentice working for Donald Trump, it would’ve been fired in the first season.” This is just one of the pearls of wisdom from Transition Voice’s new “Snarky Guide to Peak Oil.” It’s got the facts you need to debunk energy myths and the attitude you need to defuse a heated discussion with a smile.
This is a medicine story. And if I could tell you all the medicine stories I heard in my travelling days I would. Because those stories are about how life turns around just as you think it’s about to end. We need more than anything now these stories of restoration and regeneration because they hold an opportunity. If there is one theme that unites them all it is this: the transformation moment comes when you realise it’s not just about you.
The failure of economic democracy has led to the atrophy of political democracy, as corporations buy politicians: we are ‘citizens in politics but subjects in the marketplace’. While we enjoy voting rights in our political systems, ‘our economic systems are still stuck in the 18th century’. Challenging the ideology of free markets, he asks how can we claim to have free markets when firms are still stuck in the ideology of command and control?
(Article based on the keynote speech at the Buckminster Fuller Challenge awards in New York on 8 June.)
We will not transition successfully to a restorative economy until systems thinking becomes as natural, for millions of people, as riding a bike. That’s a big ask. How do we get from here, to there? …
Outside the business-as-usual tent, gradualism is on the retreat. A new kind of economy – a restorative economy – is emerging in a million grassroots projects all over the world. The better-known examples have names like Post-Carbon Cities, or Transition Towns. But examples also include dam removers, seed bankers, and iPhone doctors.
A restorative economy is emerging wherever people are growing food in cities, or turning school backyards into edible gardens. The movement includes people who are restoring ecosystems and watersheds; their number includes dam removers, wetland restorers, and rainwater rescuers. Many people in this movement are recycling buildings in downtowns and suburbs, favelas and slums.
This timeless book from Christopher Alexander was released back in the seventies, and it’s just as much a book on philosophy as on architecture. Still, the main purpose of the book is as an introduction to A Pattern Language. Alexander’s architectural writings at the same time develop a philosophy of nature and life. He proposes a more profound connection between nature and the human mind than is presently allowed either in science, or in architecture.
We’re not talking about slamming the brakes on fossil fuels. Even as our contribution to creating Peak Oil awareness begins to see a little light (at least in some circles), I am concerned that we will be so worried about saving our own bacon or appearing to be rational that we will fail to take posterity into account. If we are to save just a little oil for our children, we need to just plain stop using oil (gas, coal).
Media reports often fail to connect recurring demonstrations in Greece and Spain with those in the Middle East and North Africa (Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain). After all, the MENA demonstrations are ostensibly about democracy, while European countries already have functioning electoral systems. Protestors in Greece and Spain are instead decrying austerity programs resulting from governmental efforts to rein in deficits and debt burdens.
In this interview with Voice of America, Nourishing the Planet project director, Danielle Nierenberg, discusses her journey to sub-Saharan Africa, where she unearthed agricultural innovations that can help cope with environmental challenges, while also reducing poverty.
Neither an economist nor a formally trained scholar, Dmitry Orlov is perhaps best described in his own words, as “more of an eyewitness” to the phenomenon on which he writes. He’s a Russian émigré who saw the Soviet Union fall firsthand and has been drawing on this experience in warning of the coming U.S. collapse. He came to fame five years ago with a smash-hit Internet article that won him a loyal following and a subsequent book deal. The book, Reinventing Collapse, is now in its second edition—and regardless of how well it holds up to scholarly scrutiny, it’s admirable in its wit and prodigious street smarts.
To read these writers and take them seriously is to admit that the culture is not with us, that although solutions exists, they are smothered by widespread denial. Therefore we work in darkness and we struggle with those forces of denial–sometimes in the form of our own friends and family.
Envisioning a new investment paradigm is difficult theoretical work, but actually implementing a system that directs flows of investment cash into local food systems is even more difficult. As a nascent movement, Slow Money has moved methodically to build a robust infrastructure for implementation. A growing national network of interested people have been considering how local groups or “Slow Money Alliances” would be structured in order to accomplish the work of bringing more investment into local food systems.
A Transition Enterprise (TE) is a financially viable trading* entity that fulfils a real community need, delivers social benefits and has beneficial, or at least neutral, environmental impacts.
