Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Peak Oil, loss of diversity, species extinction, conspiracy, oil spills, food insecurity …. the problems that we face seem to increase both in size and complexity every day. However we can simplify all of these global issues and emphasize three primary concerns.
Last weekend I attended the Transition Movement 2-day introductory training course in Vancouver, along with three fellow Bowen Islanders. We immediately and unanimously agreed to establish a “Bowen in Transition” chapter, affiliated with the Vancouver Transition network (called Village Vancouver).
-Modern cargo ships slow to the speed of the sailing clippers
-Testing a London ‘Cycle Superhighway’
-Festival transforms autobahn into world’s longest street party
Our global society is in crisis, and the core of the crisis seems to be about resources: resource limits, overuse and misuse of resources, resource-related conflicts, and the resulting destruction of our natural life-support systems. The crisis is at an extreme stage, as we are approaching the final hard limits of a finite earth. This is all the more frightening because our governments seem powerless to respond effectively to the crisis. We can all see the rocks ahead, and yet the crew steams straight on, as the ship-of-state carries us toward destruction.
With the passage of the financial reform bill, giant banks see a golden opportunity to finally put the financial crisis, along with their culpability for wrecking our economy, in the rearview mirror.
The following exchange between Michael Carriere and Alex Knight occurred via email, July 2010. Alex Knight was questioned about the End of Capitalism Theory, which states that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway.
In 1998, tobacco was Kentucky’s top cash crop…Major changes swept over the tobacco industry that year when it was pressured to compensate states for the public health costs associated with smoking as part of the National Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. Kentucky received a payout of $3 billion over a 25-year period…Kentucky leaders opted to allocate $1.7 billion of its $3 billion share to agricultural development, and much of it went to support small-sized farms. This was thanks to a small but highly effective grassroots organization of family farmers and their allies, the Community Farm Alliance (CFA), which helped to ensure that much of the money devoted annually to agriculture would benefit small-sized farms directly…
I am hopefully now only days from handing in the PhD I have been doing, the closing stages of a gruelling marathon. I posted a couple of weeks ago the contents and the layout of the thesis, which is called Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: the case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK). I thought you might like to see a section of it, to give you a flavour. Apologies to regular readers that this is written in a far more academic style than you might be used to here, but hopefully you will find it useful and relevant. It comes from a section looking at the relocalisation of food, and draws from the different research I did.
Back in December in blisteringly cold Copenhagen, tens of thousands of activists, government workers, lobbyists, and world leaders came together for what many hoped would be a diplomatic breakthrough. Though the weather was cold, conditions seemed ripe: Environmental groups across the globe had worked hard to generate a strong display of public will, culminating in 350.org’s Day of Action earlier in October, which CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history." Bolstered by the announcement that President Obama would attend the talks personally, hopes were high for meaningful engagement on the part of the United States after more than a decade of inaction.
Ten days ago I spent a weekend in the northern rain teaching people how to mow grass with a scythe. I’ve been using a scythe for four or five years, though it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve got any good at it. I began using one because I wanted to cut the grass in my orchard without using smelly, noisy, petrolly power tools, and also because I had come across the great Simon Fairlie and his persuasive addiction to these ancient and mesmerising tools.
-Councils key to meeting UK’s green energy target, report warns
-Property prices soar in the desert
-Clean Energy and the U.S. Handicap: One Man’s Story
Dave Pollard’s latest at Salon is an interesting cry in the dark about how hard it is to connect with others when you see collapse coming. My guess is that some of my readers will respond with a great deal of identification, while others will be annoyed by Pollard – but I think it bears some considering.
