Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
John and I take a trip out to visit Woody and Zoe at nearby Cuckoo Farm to see their gorgeous straw bale house, which has been plastered to meet health and safety regulations, and which now looks like an ancient thatched cottage. Over cups of tea I hear about anaerobic digesters and how simple a system they are.
– a Look at the Example of Detroit
-Lessons From a Low-Impact Week
-Free Geek – Computers for the Community
We are running out of time. By 2018, converging food, water and energy shortages could magnify the probability of conflict between major powers, civil wars, and cross-border conflicts. After 2020, this could result in political and economic catastrophes that would undermine state control and national infrastructures, potentially leading to social collapse.
To some people, planting a tree is the epitome of the environmental cliche. Planting a tree seems so simple, so easy, so… low-technology.
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:
