The dangerous dance of rising food and energy prices – March 4
-The Invisible Food Crisis
-Food prices reach record highs
-Climbing fuel prices trigger alarm
-Caught in the Food Pirates’ Trap
Building Community
Earth’s limits: Why growth won’t return – water
Rivers and streams are being overdrawn, aquifers are being depleted, both surface water and groundwater are being polluted, and sources of flowing surface water–snowpack and glaciers–are receding as a result of climate change.
I’m going to be just like everyone else…
So I set out to figure out a way to be like everyone else without causing permanent brain damage, and suddenly I had a brilliant flash of intuition – I can apply those skill to my domestic life! Home, family, housekeeping, marriage – I can usefully set the skill set used by the American public to prevent themselves from having the faintest idea what is going on or why they should care, and make it part of my daily life.
Ingredients of Transition: Strategic thinking
Creating an Energy Descent Action Plan and/or the intentional relocalisation of a community will raise a lot of questions. How much arable land surrounds the settlement, how much food, fuel and fibre might it produce, what productive role might back gardens, allotments and new urban market gardens play? How much energy infrastructure is needed, and how much could realistically be installed? Failing to ask these questions will hamper attempts to think strategically about relocalisation.
What If…we stopped using money?
If you have something and you want something else then you have three basic options: you can just take the thing you want from the person who has it; alternatively you can give some of what you have in exchange for the thing you want; finally, you can sell some of what you have in exchange for something that has no intrinsic worth, but on paper (coin, slate, bead, wooden disc…) has some pre-agreed value, then use that virtual value to purchase the thing that you want.
Using traditional strategies to address water problems
Global warming has likely already caused changes in the world’s climate by delaying monsoon seasons, causing less summer precipitation and creating longer breaks between rainy periods. One group of women in southern India is turning to traditional farming practices for immediate and sustainable answers to address these water problems.
The Real El Dorado
Resiliency demands something quite different than specialization and diligent professionalism. Resiliency calls for an equally amazing and profound rise in competence on the part of citizens, consumers, eccentrics, dissenters, minorities…
Beyond Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
You learn extraordinary things living among the poor. The first thing you learn [from people] in poverty is that there is an enormous creativity. You cannot be an idiot if you want to survive.
In field and for food, the return of structural adjustment
Africa is being measured for its land profitability potential. So are other regions in the political South. This process is part of the new structural agri-food adjustment programmes that are already in place in the developing South. It includes agri-investor friendly new industrial policies, the disinvestment by and withdrawal of government equity in profitable public sector enterprises, financial sector ‘reform’ that ushers in private banking and asset management.
Transition and the cuts: a report from Camden
It was heartbreaking to be at Camden Council last night. Because of the government-imposed cuts libraries, playgroups, breakfast clubs and after school care are being swept away in a borough that has always prided itself on its public services, especially for the young. Protests outside the council turned into chaotic and ugly scenes and the police prevented demonstrators entering the building on public order grounds. A few made it in and loudly berated councillors for cutting services. Council had to be adjourned at one point.
When push comes to shove
Somehow we’re going to have to talk to each other as if everyone can hear what we are saying. If we want to break down those ancient barriers that keep us apart and create the culture we say we want we are going to have to find a way to tell those stories in Transition.
Corporations are fueling our peak oil crisis
Radio and television host and author of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight Thom Hartmann talks about ways we can all help combat global warming. Speaking from the grounds of Wisconsin’s 2010 Fight Bob Fest, Hartmann insists that Americans need to change the way we live if we are going to save the planet, and the first step has to be getting active in the political process.
