Building Community

The Radical Homemakers

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Long before we could pronounce Betty Friedan’s last name, Americans from my generation felt her impact. Many of us born in the mid-1970s learned from our parents and our teachers that women no longer needed to stay home, that there were professional opportunities awaiting us…Those of us with academic promise learned that we could do whatever we put our minds to, whether it was conquering the world or saving the world. I was personally interested in saving the world. That path eventually led me to conclude that homemaking would play a major role toward achieving that goal.

Economic Growth And Climate Change — No Way Out? (updated)

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Humankind has reached a fork in the road. The business-as-usual path implies robust economic growth with a rise in the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to anthropogenic climate change…Considered alternatives invariably lay out a vision of the future in which emissions steadily decline while economies continue to grow. Is such a vision realistic? This essay questions standard assumptions underlying this “have your cake and eat it too” view.

The Wisdom of the Uncivilized Crowds

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Picture this: A remote Indian village in the Ganges delta a few hundred years ago. The farmer starts his day by letting his flock of ducks into his irrigated fields. The water from the river brings with it, besides nutrients and alluvium, some unwanted (for the crops) pests too. But that is not a problem–the ducks will keep the pests in control. Not only that, they will turn those pests into manure and drop it right inside the pool of collected water to be anaerobically decomposed under the water.

The School Garden Debate: To Weep or Reap

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I was speaking today with a mom at my sons’ school. She was concerned about a teacher who was doing such a poor job that even his students were complaining that they weren’t learning enough…This collective economic angst, I believe, is what Caitlin Flanagan played into in “Cultivating Failure,” an article that lambastes school gardens in the January/February 2010 Atlantic. But to separate the angst from the facts, it is necessary to first look at the angst and then the facts.

The Myth of Self Reliance

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A mass emailing went out a while back from a prominent permaculturist looking for “projects where people are fully self sufficient in providing for their own food, clothing, shelter, energy and community needs. . .” There it was, the myth of “fully self sufficient,” coming from one of the best-known permaculturists in the world…But even self-reliance is barely possible, and, other than as way of expressing a desire to throw off the shackles of corporate consumerism, I don’t think it’s desirable.

Review: Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller by Jeff Rubin

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Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil…And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.

Peak Oil Is Still a Women’s Issue and Other Reflections on Sex, Gender and the Long Emergency

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In 2005, my first widely republished article was entitled “Peak Oil is a Women’s Issue” and detailed the ways that material realities for women were likely to change in an energy depleted world. I got more than a 100 emails after I wrote that piece, mostly falling into two camps – either “Wow, I never thought of that, but of course it is” and “Oh, I’ve been worrying about these issues for a long time and no one ever writes about them.”