Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Painting climate change as sheer disaster without offering an alternative vision blows people’s world to pieces and offers them nothing. This is what Rob Hopkins, an environmental grassroots campaign award-winner, sees as a significant challenge to roping people into cutting their carbon emissions.
A non-profit organization in Oakland, Planting Justice, works to empower youth to resist the corporate-controlled and toxic industrial food system and become young leaders in the burgeoning urban food justice movement…Developing skills in critical thinking, community organizing, public speaking, and ecological entrepreneurship, these youths are changing the way they identify with the food they consume and becoming leaders to other students on their high school campus and in their after school programming.
Given that we’re entering a prolonged period of economic contraction, what comes next? In the big picture, what are some of the possible routes forward? In the last post I critiqued some of the economic thinkers mentioned by the UK’s Rob Hopkins. In this post, I highlight several — including a U.S. source — which Hopkins hasn’t mentioned on his blog.
When I read the passages in the novel describing one of the festivals of The Church of the Almighty Good Food, I imagined a Breughel-like painting, teeming with ordinary folk enjoying one another and sumptuous foods in the midst of a sea of cornstalks. I even imagined a whisper from gently undulating tassels, “Serve it, and they will come.”
In this case, the underdogs are all the people who are distressed about the direction humanity is headed. We are the people craving a sane solution to climate chaos, mourning the culture of materialism, searching for solutions to the ongoing assault on nature, and hoping for an end to poverty. It will take unprecedented commitment, hard work and perseverance for us to overcome greed-based corporate agendas, outdated economic institutions, and our own reservations about saying and doing what is necessary.
With contaminated water from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear complex continuing to pour into the Pacific, scientists are concerned about how that radioactivity might affect marine life. Although the ocean’s capacity to dilute radiation is huge, signs are that nuclear isotopes are already moving up the local food chain.
Rob Hopkins describes our fossil-fuelled industrialised lifestyle as an addiction. We’re addicted to oil. And that presents humanity with a major dilemma: we find ourselves stuck inside a destructive self-replicating system with very few ideas of how to get out of it. We can either get together and find ways to liberate ourselves, or face the consequences of a planetary meltdown. Tough call either way.
Reviews of three novels set in the wake of the oil age:
– Player One by Douglas Coupland
– Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
– Afterlight by Alex Scarrow.
First Earth: Uncompromising Ecological Architecture by David Sheen is meant as an inspirational film about earthen buildings, and especially what they call “cob”. Cob is the oldest and easiest way of building from earth.
Carolyn Baker’s newest book, Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition offers a rich spectrum of personal (and potentially group) exploration around the issues experienced as we face down the collapse of industrial civilization. But this cannot be hurried. And it cannot be the domain of any one particular spiritual point of view.
The ‘holy grail’ in terms of the construction of new sustainable buildings is homes that reach the highest level of energy efficiency, whilst also using as high a proportion of locally sourced materials as possible, what we might call ‘The Local Passivhaus’. Two buildings, recently completed in Ebbw Vale, known as ‘The Lime House’ and ‘The Larch House’ have moved this concept forward significantly.
Public process as it exists today is not a desirable commons-based, inclusive, creative, bottom-up assertion of ideas by the people—although that is what it pretends to be. It’s actually an expert-driven, one-way dissemination of ideas from the top.
