Deep thought – 4 May
-The Lost World
-Peak Psychotherapy, Abundant Human Connection
-Delivering Educational Products: The Job Formerly Known as Teaching
-A National Security Strategy That Doesn’t Focus on Threats
Building Community
Third Maine town passes landmark local food ordinance
Blue Hill became the third town in Maine to adopt the Local Food and Self-Governance Ordinance. The Ordinance asserts that towns can determine their own food and farming policies locally, and exempts direct food sales from state and federal license and inspection requirements.
Editor’s picks: April 2011
Articles from last month that we found fresh or significant.
Articles on economic contraction, the ghost of ASPO-9 (climate change), the PUBLIC Library.
Plus: peak oil on Australian TV, Bathtubs: A theory of community relations, UK’s happiness movement, building a mass climate movement, sustainable ideas from religion, Octogenarian recalls the First Great Depression.
Food & agriculture – May 3
-The New Geopolitics of Food (excerpt)
-Monsanto-tied scientist abruptly quits key USDA research post
-What is a SeedBomb?
-Why Is Damning New Evidence About Monsanto’s Most Widely Used Herbicide Being Silenced?
Ingredients of Transition: Investing in Transition
Money isn’t a neutral thing. The decisions we make with our investment choices either prop up and reinforce an economic model rooted in a past of cheap energy prices and climate irresponsibility, or they can help to bring forth a new, revitalised and more appropriate way of doing things.
Renewing agriculture in Iraq
Agriculture’s role in a country like Iraq goes beyond food production: it’s the second-largest sector in the Iraqi economy, a major source of rural employment, and a vital cultural signifier. As the rest of Iraq joins the Kurdish region in enjoying greater stability, the inevitable expansion of industrial agriculture paradoxically threatens to undermine the local communities that depend on agriculture for their way of life.
Peak Moment 194: Portland’s neighborhood tool sharing libraries
Need a tool for a few days? Don’t have it? Neighbor doesn’t have it? Borrow it from your neighborhood tool library! No tool library? Check out Portland, where several neighborhoods have started successful tool libraries just in the last few years. Organizers Tom Thompson, Karen Tarnow and Stephen Couche discuss how they got started, stories of community generosity, and the enthusiastic response of all who stop by. In these neighborhoods, there’s no reason not to grab the tools you need and do that project!
Food & agriculture – May 2
– Eric Schlosser: Why Being a Foodie Isn’t ‘Elitist’
– Fava beans: Roasting pods simplifies preparation
– Are mushrooms the new plastic (video)
– Eliot Coleman: Organic agriculture: deeply rooted in science and ecology
– Radical plots: The politics of gardening
Radical homemaking: It’s not a competition
I write and research to learn more about something I feel is important, not because Bob and I are experts at implementing all the concepts. We published Radical Homemakers as a result of being on that path, not because we have mastered the lifestyle.
All Hail the PUBLIC Library
This is not the time to take the word “public” out of the public library. It is time to put it in capitals.
Happiness, simplicity and apocalypse – May 1
– Happiness theory at center stage in Soros economic conference
– The ‘I’m-happy-I’m-green’ consensus won’t placate our lust for novelty
– Simplicity Institute report shows that less can be more
– Prophets of the Environmental Apocalypse
– Venezuela Comes Sixth in Gallup “Wellbeing” Survey
I, Consumer?
Where have all the people gone? Not to mention the citizenry, human beings, neighbors, inhabitants, individuals, men, women, adults, children, workers, employees, employers? Suddenly, everywhere, gone, all of them. Their places taken by consumers.
