Building Community

Transforming higher education: Overcoming the barriers to better schooling

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For many decades, America’s global leadership success has been attributed to its robust and rigorous public higher education system. The business model upon which U.S. public higher education is built has rendered it unaffordable to students, and it is in fragile fiscal health. There is little accountability. This article discusses that transition and offers a solution: an online education environment that capitalizes on the power of digital technologies, rich content, open learning systems, and the sharing of capabilities across campus boundaries to engage students already comfortable with online interactivity.

Deconstructing Dinner: A farewell…for now! (includes update on eggs investigation)

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This episode #193 marks the final broadcast of Deconstructing Dinner before we embark on a much-needed break. Producer & Host Jon Steinman speaks about the need to step away from producing new shows and what future might lie ahead. Jon also shares some reflections on the past 5 years of producing this weekly one-hour radio show and podcast, and offers suggestions to those involved in the responsible food movement – a movement which this show has helped track its evolution and certainly one that this show has in many ways been a part of.

Voices – Dec 2

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– Paolo Bacigalupi’s SHIP BREAKER: YA adventure story in a post-peak-oil world
– New issue of Transition Voice: Holiday of crumbling cash
– Thank You for Seven Years of Worldchanging (a farewell)
– Transitions Towns and the Post-Carbon Future of Albury-Wodonga (podcast)
– Code Green Communities – radio interview

In Vancouver, a ‘crown jewel’ of local food is in the works

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If you found yourself on the southern shore of False Creek at Westminster Avenue (now Main Street) on Saturday, Aug. 15, 1908 you would happen by opening day of Vancouver’s City Market. The grand building with dual bell towers and a generous waterfront promenade is plastered with signs advertising retail and wholesale “farm products” for sale and a restaurant serving “meals at all hours.” Could B.C.’s biggest city today bring back to life so vibrant a public space, building a key component in what could be one of North America’s most robust local food economies?

Peak Moment 185: Claiming the commons — food for all on Haultain Boulevard

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Rainey Hopewell’s crazy idea has ended up feeding a neighborhood and creating community. She and Margot Johnston planted vegetables in the parking strip in front of their house. They offer them free for the taking — to anyone, anytime — with messages chalked on the sidewalk noting when particular vegies are ready to pick. Neighboring children and adults are joining in to work on the garden, harvesting fun along with food, and even handing fresh-picked vegies to passers-by.

SEWA: A movement to transform women’s lives in India and beyond

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In India, 72 percent of women are involved in agriculture. But often, these small-scale farmers confront numerous economic barriers, including lack of access to training, markets and productive inputs. In a society where gender biases are deeply ingrained, women farmers also lack access to bank accounts and land tenure. And, women are also underrepresented in farmers groups and associations, making it harder for their voices to be heard.

City Living 1 – Tales from London 8-9th November 2010

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How do we transition a city? The answer to that is perhaps, simply, for each of us look at a size that is manageable, and I don’t for one second mean by this that a city is too large, not at all, but what I do suggest is that we each ask ourselves a question; “What size of place feels manageable to me, personally?”

Literature and limits

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What is missing from most modern stories is the notion of physical resource limits. Such limits imply a tragic trajectory, the possibility of failure and punishment for overuse of the physical world. In the last half century the scientific literature has been infused with increasingly ominous warnings about such limits. But popular stories accessible to the mass of humanity, at least in rich countries, still most often champion explicitly or implicitly the ideas of a limitless material future.

From Black Friday to a better way

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Our modern economy is structured such that its stability depends upon ever increasing consumer spending. In my first economics course in college in 1961, the professor told the class to go out and shop because it is good for the gross national product (GNP). Then and now, mainstream economics continues to treat the Earth as if it were a business in a liquidation sale.