Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The other night, I had a neighborhood gathering to prepare for an earthquake. Usually, we get an expert to come from the city, but this time, we didn’t. We’d already had someone from the city a few months earlier, and, yes, she’d been very informative. But, essentially, we all just sat there, listened and went home. This time, we all talked and learned from each other and came away feeling more prepared.
Why is it that the commons is so often excluded from official policy discussions about how to manage resources and improve people’s lives? This strikes me as a serious void in our public conversations, one that we desperately need to correct.
Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was written almost 500 years ago, in the early 16th century. The book has since influenced many a philosopher interested in the concept of Utopia, in theory or in practice. It is an attempt to outline the workings of an ideal state – in this case a small island state in the New World. As I began to read this book, I was startled by the early realization that this book is nothing short of a 500-year-old vision of a steady state economy.
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Just like peak oil and global warming, economic contraction is a “game changer.” As the economy we now know crumbles, the far-reaching repercussions will sculpt every aspect of our future. In my opinion, any long-term plan — Transition EDAPs included — must anticipate that it will unfold amidst a world of economic contraction. We have to plan for it, and put alternative financial tools in place to weather it, or it will undermine all of our other efforts.
My recent piece on the cost of tuition at the Friends Seminary in Manhattan has gotten enough play to warrant a response. So here goes.
How do you tell a downstory? Downstories are hard to find in our culture. There are plenty of upstories that don’t work out that act like scary cautionary tales (if you don’t make it to the ball, you never get out of that fireplace and will always wear rags). But how do you go about telling the story of Transition, of the energy descent we have to make as individuals and as a people? How do you turn the coach back into a pumpkin and the princess back into someone who can tend a fire?
Food has become – to use an older phrase now being recycled by contemporary activists – the “edible dynamic” at the heart of mainstream economic and environmentalist debates.
Here, I discuss what we can learn from Japanese culture in terms of sustainability, referring in particular to the “Edo Period” from about 1600 AD to mid 19th century. The Japanese society of that period is one of the few historical examples we have of a “steady state” economy. How did the Japanese managed to attain that? Here I am suggesting an explanation on the basis of the old Japanese story of “the cuckoo that won’t sing.”
Montpelier resident Jane Dwinell has followed the method in Your Money or Your Life to live frugally and retire in her mid-fifties. She celebrates and elaborates on the method in her new book, Freedom through Frugality. Annie McCleary is coordinator for Transition Town Montpelier, part of the worldwide Transition movement, which helps Vermonters take control of their food, energy, and other resources, while moving from oil dependence to community resilience.
Permaculturists are the emergency planetary technicians, and bioremediation is our bailiwick.
Rowena spoke about people giving them hand-me-down clothes and a bag of groceries from time to time. “But we never felt deprived,” she told me. “And having hand-me-downs is nothing to be ashamed of.”
