Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The efficiency with which people and goods move into and within cities has a huge impact on both energy use and air quality. And the availability of non-driving modes of transportation can improve people’s lives in a lot of ways.
– Glenn Beck embraces simplicity (for real!)
– 21 Holiday Gift Ideas for the Permaculture and Guerrilla Gardening Activists in Your Life
– NYT: The Beekeeper Next Door
– The UK Crash Course… now online and available free to all UK Transition initiatives…
– Why not eat insects? (video) – new!
The yawning gap between the real world and the discipline and profession of economics has never been wider.
“The only preventive and the only remedy is for the people to choose one another, and their place, over the rewards offered them by outside investors.”
As Urbanization Week continues, Liz Borkowski put up a great post about feeding cities that includes a nice, rational discussion of the idea of Vertical Farming. I’m glad to see the issue come up, because it has so much power. We have a strong taste for complex and expensive, especially when it looks cool – generally speaking, and in an era of cheap energy and economic stability, there’s at least an argument for doing the complicated fancy thing – first, you can, second, the results are more elegant than what you can generally get without complexity. But in a society with major economic constraints and facing the reality of less, rather than more available energy for consumption, complex and expensive becomes not only a bad idea, but infeasible.
“Most of the food people eat is processed,” says Left Coast Naturals president Ian Walker. This simple truth sums up what may be the biggest hurdle for our local food system in feeding the masses.
-Redefining Prosperity
-Finding Rootedness in the Age of Vulnerability
-Transition: The Sacred, The Scared, and The Scarred
-Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order
-The “Stuff” of the American Energy Footprint
“You say things are happening … give me an example. Numerous organizations are doing lots of great work – permaculture, relocalization, etc. This is wonderful, and I’m involved in it. But everything measurable is going the wrong way. So whatever we’re doing is not working. … Unless all this community work is linked with a broader political struggle, we’re not really going to get anywhere.”
Post Carbon Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg talks about his new book (working title ‘The End of Growth’).
The Big Society is associated with localism, cuts in spending and de-regulation as opposed to community-led re-localisation. While we agree with the need to give more power to local government and local communities, how and why that is done is crucial. What we have done in Transition is to create a powerful story, around resilience and localisation, around unleashing the creative genius of communities to respond brilliantly to times of great challenge. At the end of this paper, we set out what such a story for the Big Society might look like.
The word resilience is going the way of sustainability – becoming so over-imbued with meaning that it becomes meaningless. I recently heard a presentation by somebody who was basing a whole research project around meanings of sustainability. It seems to me the time would have been better spent organising a Potato Day like the one we have coming up in Stroud.
Five years after the “100 Mile Diet”, authors Mackinnon and Smith tour us through their top ten local food projects. From the Napa Valley to New York. Winter farming in Michigan. In Canada, Toronto out-pacing Vancouver. Great talk, inspiring ideas for your food security.
