Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The world of In the Mother’s Land is one of the few credible descriptions of what a realistic ecotechnic society could look like, and this description does ask hard questions about our future and our vision of it.
We have had a period of unprecedented stability in the last decades – mostly declining food and energy costs have allowed us to live as we have. That’s changed. Now the one thing we know is that we’ll never know.
The sort of conundrums which the barter market produced helped us unmask some of the hidden dynamics of markets, in particular how we measure value.
-Do Not Pity the Democrats
-Are dying languages worth saving?
-The environmentalist’s paradox: we do better while the earth does worse
The term “loosely connected systems” popped out during a talk with a friend about the Transition Town phenomenon. Curious, I traced the concept back to a paper by Karl E. Weick during the heydey of systems thinking i 1976. It appears to be a perfect organizational architecture for Transition
(excerpts and links)
Over the coming few months I will be sharing with you the ongoing work in developing the patterns-based model of Transition that will form the centrepiece of the second version of the Transition Handbook, starting on Monday.
Chickens are the happening thing in the city — as evidenced by the fact that the our chicken coop tour was highlighted by the Los Angeles Times (none of our Transition events have ever made it past the editors of this giant paper before). There aren’t too many people who have chickens here, but there is LOTS of interest.
Tips for personal resilience from conversations I’ve had with indigenous people:
We are in a food revolution. The next generation sees the world differently. The older people alive today wanted to control the world. The new generation wants to work with it.
Ecocentrism, far from being a side issue, needs to be “the non-negotiable heart” of good human society. It is practical because it prevents us from destroying ourselves, as we are currently doing. It is ethical because it prevents us from destroying everything else at the same time, as we are also currently doing. And it is in a whole different league from discussions about which particular technology we use to run our computers.
Being mindful of the word-pictures we paint for ourselves is good thinking, no matter where you fall on the Kübler-Ross scale. To tell you why, I will leave the cliff vs. crossroads analogy for now, and turn to something I know a little bit about: martial arts.
As Scotland asserts its identity and its autonomy, environmentalists are working to restore its denuded landscape – planting native forests, creating wildlife corridors, and reintroducing species that were wiped out centuries ago.
