Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the US we may be staring at our own fate in India’s crisis. I’d suggest getting ready for it to come to a neighborhood near you sooner rather than later. Even the recent derecho was a reminder that, in fact, electricity doesn’t come from the switches on our walls, and that even our grid can look like spit balls and duct tape when an angry Mother Nature comes calling.
Modern Americans are perhaps the least self-reliant and most other-reliant people ever in the history of humanity. That might be OK if we were reliant on our friends, family and neighbors for food, clothing and companionship. But sadly most of us are really just dependent on big corporations and workers across the globe to grow our food, make our stuff and inform and entertain us.
Have you ever crashed a realtor’s open house — not because you were a buyer, but just so you could see what the owners have done with the house? That’s kind of how we feel when we read about the three Mother Earth News 2012 Homesteaders of The Year. We want to stop by each of these homes, just so we can learn everything about what they’re doing!
There is an elegiac beauty in loss (or what we imagine is loss), to coming home, to realising your limits, to deepening your experience, to loving the neighbourhood, the people in the room, a humble dish of new potatoes, the small strip of seashore I go to each day, where once I could roam the world like Alexander. In fact when you look back and see the track you have made, the dance you have made with your fellows, that’s when you understand everything, the beauty of it all – even the hard times. We’re trying as a people to get back on track against all odds.
Cultural values are group norms or rules for behavior that make a culture work. Ethical values are our cultural DNA. But our values can change in response to the conditions of the economy and environment. Our current value system is no longer working—money, science, laws, mores, politics, religion, and culture are becoming less meaningful to many…The survival of the whole system is at stake, and ethics will begin to shift as old ways of doing and being endanger humanity…
The premise of this chapter is that there is a proliferating movement of initiatives seeking to defend the commons (mostly in the Global South) or restore the commons (mostly in the Global North), to ensure our survival and well-being. This chapter is also premised on the notion that we still have time to act to restore our socio-ecological sustainability.
Sometimes well-meaning ‘green’ people like to imagine that the eco-cities of the future are going to look either like some techno-utopia – like the Jetson’s, perhaps, except environmentally friendly – or some agrarian village, where everyone is living in cob houses that they built themselves. The fact is, however, that over the next few critical decades, most people are going to find themselves in an urban environment that already exists – suburbia.
There will be at least 100 million more Americans by 2050, and likely 150 million more. Yet the cities that will house them are so spatially and economically unstable that it is impossible to do much beyond superficial sustainability planning. One solution is to anchor and recycle wealth in communities, using locally owned businesses as bulwarks against uncontrolled economic forces that have decimated regions like the U.S. Rust Belt. Cities built to last, as a community wealth building effort in Cleveland suggests, can offer a sustainable home for America’s population boom and point the way to a greener economy.
Rental or leasehold coops are democratically run organizations of tenants that equitably share costs of renting or leasing a building owned by someone else. Rental coops may share part of the management responsibility and often have more power collectively than single renters leasing from a conventional landlord. Nonprofits can also buy a building and rent it out to lower income folks who might not be able to afford shares. Sharing a house can offer big savings and can help people avoid foreclosure.
In one of the poorest countries on the planet a renewable energy service company is installing one thousand solar home systems – a day. Not in its capital or busy urban centers, but where 80 percent of the population lives – in rural Bangladesh. The company, Grameen Shakti, literally translates as rural energy. By the end of the year it will have installed a total of one million solar systems and now has expansion plans to install five million systems by 2015. Shakti is succeeding where business as usual has failed, and in the year of Sustainable Energy for All, it’s a success story we should all know by heart.
-James Howard Kunstler on Why Technology Won’t Save Us
-Power by the People
-Nuclear power vs. people power
-Breakthrough Material for Carbon Capture Developed
-Effect of Global Warming on U.S. Energy Consumption
-The missing link to a $7 billion market
We found our original premise holds. While the mainstream media focus on Washington and Wall Street, we found the real agents of change are on Main Street, where they are testing and perfecting some amazing innovations.
