Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
People have asked me about my impressions of my trip and there is one word I want to communicate: Local. The stops were so varied, the needs so diverse, the problems so different, it is difficult to generalize, but I’ll try anyway.
It is not so important to me that my kids can explain the significance of a locavore diet at their age. But I do want them to know what food is supposed to taste like when it is a product of a healthy ecosystem. I want them to experience what their bodies feel like when they are nourished in a way that is in harmony with the Earth.
-Brenda Palms Barber, The Promised Land (audio interview)
-Fowl energy: Chicken poo lights Gloucestershire town
-Bio-Agriculture – a Solution to Climate Change
This time Janaia’s in the hot seat! In this interview by Jim Fritz on Port Townsend Television, she tackles corporate control and a dysfunctional system that profits from increasing unhealthiness and consuming the planet. She points to Peak Moment guests as models for the average family to gain genuine security. They’re withdrawing from the money system, growing food, and joining neighbors to prepare for emergencies.
Promoting the idea of local food production and the rollout of urban agriculture, whether in the form of market gardens, allotments or back gardening, will clearly struggle if no land is made available to make it possible. Many settlements, even if they are built to a high density, will have both land within them that could be used, and also land around them. Ensuring secure access to this land will be vital.
Halloween may be over, but monstrous robosigners and zombie banks still stalk the midnight streets of the American psyche, and the decision of the US government to begin financing its debt via the printing press moves us into a dangerous new phase of history. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that big problems must have big solutions, but if the rising spiral of crisis no longer leaves room for solutions at all, the Archdruid suggests, it may be time for a counterintuitive approach.
Economic localization offers the key to solving a growing number of global problems, including peak oil, climate disruption, and financial meltdowns. Yet the perception remains that this solution is very costly, because local goods and services supposedly are more expensive than their global alternatives.
In fact, local goods and services are already competing remarkably well in the marketplace—and they are likely to do better in the near future. This chapter lays out why cost effectiveness actually is a reason to embrace localization and argues that the only thing standing in the way of localization flourishing is, oddly, policy-makers committed to propping up increasingly noncompetitive global corporations.
-Sellwood Bridge the latest project for bicycling advocate
-Peter Hendy interview
-European Cities Get the Bike Bug
“I know all about food security,” says Mitharam Maslai, a farmer from India’s Northeast highlands. “We ate only pumpkin and bamboo shoots every year for two to three weeks because we had run out of rice.”
The election is over and the results are depressing, much as expected – it was not a good night for anyone who believes that the most important work of government in hard times will be protecting ordinary people. This is a stretch to imagine at the best of times, and this was not them. There’s a larger question, however, that emerges out of the ashes of our usual political self-incineration – what will ordinary people will do with their fear now that the election is over?
Articles that we thought were significant this month.
In the wake of the oil supply shocks of the 1970s, the U.S. DOT encouraged the development of regional transportation energy contingency plans. But by the early 1980s, regional and local governments stopped developing transportation energy contingency plans as the threat of fuel supply disruptions diminished, as funding and support for the development of these plans discontinued, and as other more pressing issues emerged. Nearly 30 years later, there are warnings that we are again at risk for potential fuel shortages.
