Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
GNH (Gross National Happiness) attempts to balance economic development, environmental conservation, good governance, and cultural promotion. Bhutan’s first prime minister, Lyonchoen Jigme Y. Thinley, is now working to radically transform Bhutan’s national education system to reflect GNH values, which he defines as “sacredness, reverence, honour, and respect.”
The System of Rice Intensification SRI) is an innovative method of increasing the productivity of irrigated rice with very simple adjustments to traditional techniques. It involves transplanting younger seedlings into the field with wider spacing in a square pattern, irrigating to keep the roots moist and aerated instead of flooding fields, and increasing organic matter in the soil with compost and manure.
The Global North and South both waste similar portions of the food they produce, but there is a significant difference between them – the majority of the wastage in the global south comes from lack of ability to preserve food – no refrigeration, no easy way to preserve it on a large scale, and limited market access or long times from harvest to market…In the Global North, the picture is different. We do lose food at harvest, but the majority of all food loss is household and market – supermarkets throwing out lightly dinged cans and crates of produce, households buying food and burying it in the back of their refrigerators – this is the picture of food waste in the Global North.
At a recent conference, I saw the potential for blending two of the most exciting emerging movements of our time—the living building and the living economies movements. A vision of the combination of these two movements energized me with renewed hope that we humans can end our isolation from one another and from nature—that we can move forward to achieve a prosperous, secure, and creative human future for all.
Although it is peak oil and climate change that initially inspire Transition initiatives and form the underpinning for much of the initial awareness stage, might it be that an initiative reaches a point where continued focus on those issues could be counterproductive?
Movements don’t live on bright ideas and hard work alone. Martin Luther King Jr. said that movements need to offer people a portrait of what the future could look like. So here is a vision of a commons-based society of the future, rising out of the ashes of greedy individualism in a gated community outside Houston.
The Gulf Coast region, still reeling from the oil-laden assault on its ecosystem and livelihoods, is now bracing for what’s being called one of the worst cases of flooding since the 1920s and “the nation’s slowest moving natural disaster.” Economists are projecting billions of dollars in damages just as local Gulf-dependent industries such as fisheries, aquaculture, and tourism are struggling back to profitability after the devastating blows from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the BP oil spill.
More and more I’m finding that it’s good to know people who can do things, and these people are of two sorts: those who can do things you don’t know much about and those who know more than you about what you know. From both you can learn.
A bio-diverse culture needs us to be diverse, which is to say we need to be intrinsically ourselves – rooted in place and within our skills – and working as part of the whole. Coming from a broad frequency band, rather from a narrow, seperated point of view. This is a new way of working in the world: one that combines a modern city intelligence with an ancestral knowledge of the land.
The left I want is a complicated one: it’s a left which wants to put empowerment first, and that means helping people–as I must always remind myself as well–grasp the limits, the particularity, within which such empowerment is possible. That’s a hard left to maintain, and who knows? Perhaps it’s an imaginary one.
What we need are generated cities, not fabricated!
So what do you think? Do you think left and right, in some or all variations can work together? To what extent are political ends enough, and to what extent are the means and underlying enlightenment philosophies critical?
