Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As a small girl, Enei Begaye knew to be quiet when visiting friends’ houses. Nearly everyone in the 4,900-person town of Kayenta, Arizona, part of the Navajo Nation, worked in the area’s coal mines, Black Mesa and Kayenta, which operated twenty-four hours a day. Begaye and her friends would play quietly so they wouldn’t disturb sleeping elders back from the night shift.
I plant weeds sometimes. I just feel I should admit this upfront, and come out with it and accept your outrage. You see, my property isn’t exactly untouched – it was a sod farm at one point (although most of the actual sod harvesting was done across the road on a field that is not mine), which means that for about decade from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, people poured incredibly toxic chemicals on the ground to keep the grass uniform and then dug up the topsoil and sold it rich people who couldn’t wait long enough for grass to grow.
Take a tour, accompanied by curious sheep and geese, of Mark Cooper’s self-sufficient small farm. Over several years, he transformed a rundown house and hillsides of berry brambles into pasture and gardens where he produces and preserves most of his family’s food. Visit the Goose Grotto in a constructed pond, a heritage fruit tree orchard, logs producing shiitake mushrooms, and a cheap-and-easy container kitchen garden…This farmstead in Rough and Ready (CA) lives up to the town’s name — and is a testament to hard work, wide-ranging construction skills, and love.
South Asians are seeing more work on the ground and hearing more policy announcements about urban development than ever before. For many who live in and around towns and cities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India (where South Asia’s biggest cities lie) this could be a good thing. The trouble is: national governments and planning authorities in Dhaka, Islamabad and New Delhi are tending more and more to follow a single ideology – economic growth will drive down poverty – and a primary route to that misplaced objective, which is greater urbanisation.
3 years, 8 months and a day ago, 400 of us gathered here in this hall to ‘Unleash’ what we had just decided to call ‘Transition Town Totnes’. It was an extraordinary evening which I am sure some of you will remember. Since then, TTT has grown to become a powerful force in this community…At the Unleashing, we committed to work towards the creation of an EDAP for Totnes and district, and today, here it is.
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 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…
-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
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.
