Building Community

Desalination: Unlocking lessons from yesterday’s solution

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There is powerful information waiting to be unleashed in water data. If it were set free it would force us to re-think how we use, develop, sell, transfer, and dispose of water. Rather than focusing on the miles per gallon our cars get, we might consider how much water per mile that fuel’s production required. Rather than arguing over how much energy is being used to produce water, we would give credit to how much water is required to produce energy. Rather than focusing on whether our food is grown locally, we would consider how much water it took to grow that food in our locality.

Riches-to-rags – Our fashionable stories of stuff

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Sometimes l think about the clothes I used to own and it shocks me that I remember my wardrobe more intimately, more joyfully than I remember my friends of that time. The question I ask myself now is: is this because we were damned, fallen angels trapped in the colourful lures of the material world, or is it because our relationship with matter, with the fabric of the earth, has never been truly celebrated or understood? Or is it that our letting go of Stuff, our powerdown, has become the most urgent and most interesting story of our times?

Year one of the global commons movement

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Whatever we do, whatever we produce – we need common pool resources. So, the very question we have to answer is: What do we want to do with them? Do we want to produce commodities and convert everything – our collective knowledge, our genes, solar energy, public arenas and spaces, water, beaches, social care, etc. – into commodities? Or do we want to sustain and reproduce them as commons? It’s our choice.

Mink River

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Mink River is simply the best novel I have read in a decade. It is brilliantly and painstakingly crafted. It tells a wonderful and heart-warming story. It never manipulates. Its prose is pure poetry: Every word counts. Its characters are so contemporary and complex and familiar that they spring to life. And its message — about cultural transition driven by necessity, about the importance of community and of place and of resilience and of love — is essential and delivered with a power and richness that no non-fictional account could hope to match.

Lentils and justice for all

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Food justice is about ensuring access to healthy, quality food for all people, no matter their economic position. Ahmadi and Reverend Jeffrey sat down with YES! to explain how a total reorientation of the food system can support community health and wealth—planting local businesses, creating jobs, and growing a public understanding about why our current paradigm fails us all, especially those in the most need.

Peak Moment 189: Menu for the future: bringing famers to the table

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What happens if you create 25 small groups to discuss food values and issues, and include a local farmer or food producer in each one? Innovative organizers Judy Alexander, Dick Bergeron and Peter Bates facilitated the “Menu for the Future” groups to support local farmers and educate eaters. Results? Eaters changed their food choices, and the market for local food products expanded. Winners all around!

An interview with Michael Shuman: if we’re serious about localisation, “all of us have to go to business school”

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The more that we can create alternative systems by channelling our consumption and investment and convince others these are great ways of living, and consistent with what we’re trying to achieve long term, I think that’s the way we’re going to succeed.

How expensive is food, really?

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The food crisis is manifestly just that – a crisis. At the same time, there’s another side to this coin. Rising food prices are to some extent good for farmers. And there are plenty of people, me included, who have been arguing for years that we don’t pay enough of the true costs of our food. So who is right? How do you balance the merits and demerits of food prices?

Desperately seeking “hozho”

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Hozho enfolds a concept that we westerners vehemently and vocally reject: inevitability. We are the people of the fabled “fat lady”—nothing is over till she sings, and even then we hold out hope that game officials will reverse the call on further review and deliver a last-minute miraculous victory for our side. The idea that things just “are the way they are”, no matter what we do, goes against our ingrained, up-by-our-boot-straps belief that we are the masters of our fate. If something ain’t right it’s just because we haven’t fixed it yet. We only need to think harder, work longer, swear louder—and, by God, beat some balance back into this thing.