Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We tend to settle into routines. But once in a while extraordinary events disrupt normalcy. We may question assumptions and be open to new information and change. A grief process is common in these times too. The accident in the Gulf of Mexico is a disruptive event. Here’s an essay that puts it into personal perspective for me.
Call it surrender, service, group mind, collective intelligence, cooperation. They all point us in another direction, these qualities of rough Shared-Being shuffling towards Bethlehem to be born.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) goes up not only when good things happen, but when bad things happen as well. Things like mining disasters or oil spills can put a lot of money into the economy. Consequently the little country of Bhutan decided to measure Gross National Happiness instead of GDP. And now, cities around the world are starting to get involved.
-The Ecology of Socialism
-Slouching towards neofeudalism
-Debt: The first five thousand years
-Principles of human needs placemaking
-Thoughts on Teaching Wendell Berry
-Organic farms ‘produce less than HALF as much food as conventional ones’
-Study shows low carbon credentials of local food
-Can U.S. farms produce food without relying heavily on fossil fuels?
-Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds
-Fears That a Lush Land May Lose a Foul Fertilizer
-Domestic blitz
-Pollan and Hurst Debate the Future of Agriculture
The map of the area threatened by the BP blowout, comprising nearly half of the US’s coastal wetlands, looks like tattered lace. It’s a realm of islands, shoals, estuaries, marshes, swamps, bayous, and creeks, land speckled across water, water twining across land, all of it in flux…
Our brain likes ‘happy’ chemicals and we tend to find ways to effect their release. Trouble is, we become quickly habituated to stimulation and then seek novelty in order to get that same old feeling. Our modern society gives us so many opportunities to be rewarded, but many people can’t handle it. They gradually become addicted to unhealthy things.
Even where it comes to renewable energy, we face the battle of centralization vs. relocalization, the corporatism of politics vs. democracy. Economically, technologically, politically, we face the same democratic struggle.
I am on record as believing that the de-industrialization of our agriculture is both wise and inevitable – I do not believe we will have the wealth, the energy resources or the ability to absorb the outputs of our present agricultural model over the long term, and that because such a transition is necessary, we’d be better off doing it sooner than later, and more gradually than not. I believe in the necessity of that transition, and I also believe it is viable to drop the energy intensiveness of our agriculture dramatically while still feeding people…
It gives me the greatest pleasure this morning to launch the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website. The site makes the full version of the UK’s first EDAP freely available, invites comments and discussion, and will act as a dynamic portal for people to discuss the Plan and reshape subsequent revisions.
Sam Mogannam is the much-loved owner of San Francisco’s Bi-Rite Market, Bi-Rite Creamery, and founder of 18 Reasons, a community space that invites people to explore art, food, and community…With his market and his devotion to people, and farmers in particular, he’s brought back the family-owned grocery and created a renewed sense of community in this pocket of the Mission District (and also my neighborhood). I sat down with him in his office above the store recently to interview him as the first in a series of perspectives on folks around the country who are making a difference in the effort to transform our food system.
Conservation efforts are surely the only sane response to the insane destruction accelerating all around us. But what should we spend our time conserving, and how can we maximize success? In this essay I discuss my local community garden as a conservation project and the factors that I believe are making it successful.
