A different way of thinking – Sept 3
– World’s Greenest Priest Leads Global Prayer Against Climate Change
– Zen and the art of protecting the planet (Thich Nhat Hahn)
– Social Traps and the Problem of Trust
Building Community
Resilience: a way of life
Jim Kunstler’s question: Where the hell are all the “reasonable, rational, educated people of purpose in this country”? Well, some of us are at home tending chickens and pruning tomatoes. Some of us have realized that we can’t be everywhere at once and have made a choice. We may not be making front page headlines in daring acts of activism; but having organized marches down main street in my time, I can tell you that nothing has ever brought my community together more effectively than putting a shovel in the ground and growing vegetables in plain sight.
We reap what we have sown
When a friend lent me his copy of Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution (republished last year by the New York Review of Books), I was struck by one sentence in particular. Somewhere in the middle of this charming, eccentric book, one of the founding texts of natural, non-interventionist farming, Fukuoka asserts that “the one-acre farmer of long ago spent January, February and March hunting rabbits in the hills”. Later on, he says that while cleaning his village shrine he found dozens of haikus, composed by local people, on hanging plaques; but “there is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song”.
The gathering hordes
Proponents of the so-called “barbarian invasion” theory today warned of the “potentially disastrous” effects of hundreds of thousands of Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals plundering the imperial capital, including death, despoilment and dismemberment of the populace, and destruction of the city’s ancient architecture and temples.
The Long and the Short of It: Existential Comfort in the Age of Hopkins and Greer
…fortunately I don’t actually have to choose between Hopkins and Greer. If I did have to, I would feel that much of what drew me to Transition had been lost to organizational identity and pride. One is only forced to make such a choice when a set of ideas or principles gets mistaken for the foundation or orthodoxy of a Movement. Those of us in Transition should take this as a great warning.
Housing & urban design – Sept 3
-Americans want smaller homes, not McMansions
-HafenCity: A Case Study on Future-Adaptive Urban Development
-Straw Bale Model House
Food & agriculture Take 2: More feeding the world worries and is organic food finally really better?
-Land grabs, biofuel demand raise global food-security risk
-Commercial Organic Farms Have Better Fruit and Soil, Lower Environmental Impact, Study Finds
-Fears grow over global food supply
I can save the world better than you, nyah nyah!
A short history of the peak oil movement and reflections on wizards, Transition and the interstices of reason. Let us start with persona, since one goes to any prizefight to see the metaphorical battle of two created characters, embodying sides, virtues, faults.
In this Corna… John Michael Greer, owner (by a whisker over Bob Waldrop) of the finest beard in Peak Oildom, Archdruid, moral descendent of Toynbee and Gibbon, considerer of declines in centuries, not weekends. No Zombies for Greer – we are Rome, and we might as well deal with it, dammit.
in this Corna…Rob Hopkins, beardless founder of the Transition movement, permaculturist, endless energetic optimist and municipal leader, student of the first half of the British century, bent of reorganizing his community and the world to adapt to energy descent. If we could live without that energy once before, well, we can do it now, and let’s get at it.
Green Wizardry: A response to Rob Hopkins
Rob Hopkins’ critique of the “Green Wizards” project explored in recent Archdruid Report posts raises challenging questions: some of them about the project in question, others about the relationship between differing efforts to respond to a challenging future. The Archdruid offers his take on both subjects.
Review of Brenda Boardman’s Fixing Fuel Poverty
Brenda Boardman continues to do pioneering work in the field of fuel poverty in Britain. She is Emeritus Fellow with the Lower Carbon Futures at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. Twenty years ago, Boardman wrote her landmark study, Fuel Poverty: From Cold Homes to Affordable Warmth, which provided the first quantifiable definition of fuel poverty (ie. when a household spends more than 10% of its income on energy services).
How fools progress
There are days I wonder if I’m out of my depth homesteading. (I’m a new homesteader in rural Ontario. You can read what that’s looking like here.) So much of my natural occupation has been about documents and computers. I’m at home in that world and understand it. But here in DIY-land there’s so many parts I don’t know, so many systems Like the Fool, my friend in the tarot deck, I step out with unknown perils ahead.
Food: Growing community food systems
Food systems can be a very powerful tool for resilience. In a revolutionary way, you can completely transform things without people realizing what’s happening–they are aware, but it just makes intuitive sense this way. It’s also not about just going out and fighting the proverbial "man," or continuing an academic dialogue about what could happen or should happen; you don’t have time for this because you’ve got a lot to do.
