Building Community

Eyeing the difficult path to a sustainable future

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In an interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, Orr talked about the current battle over climate and energy legislation, President Obama’s missed opportunity to use his “bully pulpit” to educate the public about global warming, and what he calls the right wing’s “unconscionable misuse” of the airwaves to spread lies and misinformation about climate change.

Peak Moment 171: A permaculture course for busy people

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Bill Wilson and Wayne Weiseman pour their hearts into their permaculture design courses, changing lives as well as landscapes. In a unique format, students do initial course work online and then attend a one week hands-on course. In this chat along with Sivananda Yoga Farm sponsor Vidya Chaitanya, Wayne discusses principles starting with observing elements like wind, water, sun and topography in a specific property. Bill provides alarming information on “peak soil.”

BP beyond the oil spill, business as usual? – May 25

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-Reflections on an Oil Spill: A New Orleans Native Speaks Out
-Fishgrease: DKos Booming School
-Human Health Tragedy in the Making: Gulf Response Failing to Protect People
-Screw the Environment: BP and the Audacity of Corporate Greed

Collapse, Transition, the Great Turning, why words matter

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As the work I do circulates around the nation and the world, I frequently encounter resistance to the use of the word “collapse” to describe the unprecedented changes that humans and the earth community is now experiencing. Many people insist that we should focus only on “Transition” and the “Great Turning” because these words make more bearable and palatable the challenges of present and future time. The word collapse, they argue, should be ditched.

A smarter planet?

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“Let’s build a smarter planet.” This is IBM’s inspirational slogan, intoned as a benediction at the end of their 2010 advertisements. They do not say, “Let’s make a smarter adaptation to our planet Earth, out of which we were created and by which we are sustained.” It is the planet that is insufficiently smart, not its evolutionary prize-winning, big-brained, star tenant.

Singularity > Climate Change > Peak Oil > Financial Crisis

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While lying awake late at night worrying about what kind of world my children will inherit, I find it helpful to come up with schemas for the most obvious and inevitable of the large societal problems.  It makes them seem slightly more manageable to place them in order of importance, or time.  Further, being clear on what are the biggest and most important problems is an essential prerequisite to thinking about solutions: these problems all interact, and solutions to the smaller of them may not be radical enough to address the larger of them.

Is the world falling apart?

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If you have to pose the question in today’s title, then you have also gone a long way toward answering it. When I say “the world” I am referring to the global economy in the short-term (within 1 year). I don’t doubt “the world” is falling apart in the long-term, but that will takes years (oil price shocks) or decades (dead oceans) to unfold. Obviously, shorter-term outcomes influence the timing of (still inevitable) longer-term outcomes.

Deconstructing Dinner: Rally for Wild Salmon, Fish Farms out, (Norway, British Columbia VI)

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On May 8, 2010, Deconstructing Dinner descended upon the grounds of the Legislature of British Columbia in Victoria where one of the largest rallies of its kind was taking place. The rally was organized as part of the 2.5 week long “Get Out Migration” calling for the removal of open-net salmon farms along the B.C. coast. Between April 21 and May 8, biologist Alexandra Morton travelled from the community of Echo Bay in the Broughton Archipelago and proceeded on foot down Vancouver Island where hundreds of supporters joined her as they approached the BC Legislature. An estimated 4,000 people attended the rally.