Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A polyculture lawn, which some call a clover lawn, provides ecological services, increases biodiversity, helps manage and conserve water, and stores carbon. Not only that, it looks good, it’s safe for children and animals, and it’s cheap. All you have to do is move beyond the idea that a lawn should comprise grass and grass alone.
Fleeing Vesuvius is practical and fundamentally optimistic. It will arm readers with the confidence and knowledge they need to develop new, workable alternatives to the old-style expanding economy and its supporting systems.
Yes, there is serious trouble at our doorstep. Yes, society is undergoing dramatic convulsions of contraction and change—right now. But we will make things much worse on ourselves if we fail to factor into our calculations the welfare of others, not just our own. We are only as safe as the least secure of our neighbors–period. Some people respond to that idea by building deeper bunkers. What would happen if we reached out instead?
The UN Climate Conference (COP16) in Cancun is turning out to be both anti-climactic and anti-climatic. There will be no major agreement to stop global warming this week, despite the timed release of a number of reports that show that the phenomenon is advancing more rapidly than expected, with lethal consequences. There likely will be announcements of progress in schemes to allow contaminating industries and nations to continue with business as usual and add another lucrative area to their portfolios—trade in carbon offsets and credits. It’s a worst-case scenario for the planet.
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.”
