Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We are cultivating a hunter-gatherer garden, modifying but not eradicating the forest ecology. Not so different from what the Wampanoag and Narragansett did, but more suited to our greater numbers. We are growing wildlife and insects and biological diversity. We are bringing wilderness home. We buy less food. We need fewer fields. Who will say to us or our children or our grandchildren in 50 years that this place isn’t wilderness?
Rebecca Burgess is an ecological restoration educator, author, and textile artist. Burgess is the founder of the Fibershed Project; a year-long challenge to live in clothes made from fibers sourced within 150 miles from her home. In this interview, Burgess explains what a fibershed is, talks about the hidden environmental costs of the textile industry, and shares with listeners some of her favorite natural fabrics.
This survey offers you an enjoyable way to learn just how well you are doing in the nine domains of happiness identified by researchers around the world. Groups like Transition can use the survey to asses community well-being now and in the long term.
So ownership matters; but so does control. Why leave the management of the universities in the hands of those who have managed to best compete in the internal bureaucracy? Why not move beyond the trust model towards a fully-fledged multi-stakeholder co-operative? Who is better placed to decide the strategy for the university, and the content of its curriulum? A manager, or the academics and their students?
Watch baker Jen Ownbey whip up a batch of zucchini bread while she talks with Janaia about doing what she loves. Every week, members of her bakery CSA (community supported agriculture) get a handmade, local, mostly organic, and even personalized box of breads and bakery desserts. Jen talks about getting started, selling wholesale and at growers markets, plus the joys, lessons, and challenges of running a solo business.
It is worthwhile to recall history as we ponder Tim Murray’s proposition that we direct our “energy into stopping economic growth” rather than saving “the environment piecemeal” through conservation efforts. It’s enlightening to go back to Thomas Jefferson just to gain some perspective on what happened when the market economy was fertilized with the industrial revolution.
[I] wrote about things that deeply affected me on a global and planetary level and what Transition was doing at a local level to configure the world that had got so out of balance: seedling swaps and community gardens, Transition Circles, Bungay Community Bees, all our decisions to use less energy, eat differently, come together in small bands and work to build a low-carbon culture.
In the closing months of the first decade of the twenty-first century, what does the world need most?
We do have to talk about population – we have to talk about it honestly and clearly, and with an eye to the real complexities of the issue. We have to put it on the table and stop being afraid of it. We have to have these conversations even when they are difficult, personal, emotional and when they are hard.
Buried in yesterday’s Boston Globe online in the City Desk for Cambridge was a little gem of an article that talked about a cat fight between new urbanists, a movement espousing more compact, walkable urban form, and a newcomer called landscape urbanism, who claim to be more ecologically sophisticated and environmentally conscious and suggest that new urbanists have it all wrong…
(Problem fixed!)
– Politics and the Pleasure Principle
– Green giants: the eco power list
– Eco power lists: Fatuous, invidious and misrepresentative
– Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation: Young Green Activists for a Warming World
– Film review: “The Economics of Happiness”
– Beyond the Economic Treadmill and Toward True Well-being
– Analyst sees little Egypt oil and gas impact
– Q&A: Suez Canal
– U.S. envoy tells Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step aside
– Egypt’s Unrest May Have Roots in Food Prices, US Fed Policy
– Soccer clubs central to ending Egypt’s ‘Dictatorship of Fear’
– The Egyptian people tend to the streets that are now their own (video)
