Building Community

Steel, cycling and Steeltown

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As the effects of Peak Oil make themselves felt, they will go far beyond gas prices.

The Canadian auto industry employs around a half million people directly and indirectly, almost all of which is in Ontario. This isn’t just building and selling cars – there’s a massive manufacturing empire needed to mine the ore, make the steel and machine the parts that extends well beyond Ford or Toyota. So what do we do with two of the nation’s largest steel mills? …

If cycling is going to catch on as a major means of transportation, somebody’s going to have to start building new affordable and practical bikes. That’s where steel comes in.

Stories from the mountain-top

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As part of its focus on action in the present–the moment at which oil is peaking–as a time of opportunity for decisive action of historical consequences, the Transition Movement embraces the act of telling stories; stories are a crucial tool for this monumental change–as important, perhaps, as our new-found ability to darn socks and grow Kale. (Part 2 of “Existential Comfort in the Age of Hopkins and Greer”)

Xenophobia all over the place?

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The dictionary defines xenophobia as “fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.” It seems to be an endemic plague everywhere in the world. But it infects larger numbers of people only sometimes. This is one of those times.

Resilience: a way of life

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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

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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

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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

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…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.