Building Community

The fruit of sharing

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In our local neighborhood in Los Angeles, for the third year running, we are hosting a group purchase of bare root fruit trees.  It started on a whim.  I was ordering bare root fruit trees for my own yard, and thought perhaps a few others might wish to piggyback on my order.  I posted it on our local Transition email loops and suddenly my order had exploded to 21 trees!  We qualified for extra volume discounts at the supplier, and the box that arrived on my doorstep the following January was so big that it could easily have contained one of the Lakers basketball players!

 

Up Water Tower Hill

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In “The Story of Here Begins” I asked myself the question: Setting aside the issues of the wide world for a second, who and what are right here under my nose? Well, from the top of Water Tower Hill, one answer is abundantly clear: My little ten-mile world is filled with cars. Lots and lots and lots—a god king hell of a lot—of cars. A large slice of the blame for a century’s worth of wrong turns can be laid at the feet of this one invention. More than any other single toy in the playroom of technology, it has enabled us to go completely crazy—and to get there in air conditioned comfort and style!

Ecocentrism: a response to Paul Kingsnorth

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Paul Kingsnorth’s impressive and heartfelt essay traces the evolution of modern environmental thought and practice through the prism of his personal experience. I was struck by how closely this experience matches the trajectory of a book I first published in 1990 called Green Political Thought and which has been through three more editions since.

Crop to Cuisine: Garden cocktails, Pakistan flooding, and From Crop to Cup

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This week on Crop To Cuisine, we go into the garden in search of cocktails with Paul Abercrombie, Author of “Organic, Shaken and Stirred”. Pakistan is in the midst of the worst flooding disaster in history. The WFP speaks with us about the realities on the ground and what people can do to help. And our series on the most popular beverage in the world continues, From Crop To Cup. All of that, headlines in food and farming, and more.

Message from from a devastated Ladakh

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Early in the morning of August 6th an unusually strong thunderstorm hit Ladakh, a remote Himalayan region in the Indian state of Jammu-Kashmir on the western edge of the Tibetan plateau. Ladakh is normally one of the driest inhabited areas in the world – a region unaccustomed to heavy rains. When the intense cloudburst hit early on the morning of the 6th, the impact was especially severe. The storm caused massive flash flooding that left over one hundred dead and many more missing.

Waste not: Seattle’s road to zero trash

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A key strategy that contributes to Seattle’s carbon neutrality work was approved by the Council in 2007, when my Zero Waste Initiative was adopted as City policy. The things we throw away not only generate carbon as they decompose—they also carry the embedded carbon that was used in creating them. Zero Waste is a strategy that addresses both of those aspects.

Peak Everything: Preface to the paperback edition

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A good case can now be made that the year 2007, when this book originally appeared, was indeed the year, if not of “peak everything,” then at least of “peak many things.” Since then we have begun a scary descent from the giddy heights of consumption achieved in the early years of this century.

Economics as if people mattered

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Robert Costanza is professor of ecological economics at the University of Vermont and director of the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics. He talks about the things most economists overlook, like the fact that growth can’t continue forever on a finite planet, and the ways our well-being is not connected with how much money we have.

Confessions of a recovering environmentalist

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“Environmentalism, which in its raw, early form had no time for the encrusted, seized-up politics of left and right, has been sucked into the yawning, bottomless chasm of the ‘progressive’ left.” A personal, twenty-year journey through the world’s wild places and the movements to protect them is also, for Paul Kingsnorth, an education in the limits of a project that has forgotten nature and lost its soul.

The failure of networked systems: The repercussions of systematic risk revisited

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There are those among the Peak Oil community who suspect that we could be facing a failure of our interdependent society that may be sudden, profound, and complete. I have repeatedly said that I am not numbered among them. My opinion is that our way of life will have to change significantly, but slowly. I don’t expect to be clubbing anybody with a femur in any foreseeable future. This opinion is on record in both print and electronic media, and I don’t expect to be issuing a retraction any time soon–but a recent event forced me to admit that I may have to hedge a little.

The dilemma of poverty in the South: equity or transformation

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The Transition Movement in the ‘West’ (and therefore North) has for the most part been unable to conceptualise a response to the human development and social justice needs of the South. Much of this lack has to do with the very formidable inertness which western societies inherited from the transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and the apparently incontrovertible ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘growth.’