Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Hot from combined gatherings of Peak Oil, Climate, and new planning experts in Vancouver, October, this episode of Radio Eco-shock features California green guru Warren Karlenzig on post carbon cities and former Shell Exec now anti-corporate activist Anita Burke. This is the first of a series of speakers from “Gaining Ground/Resilient Cities, Urban Strategies for Transition Times” conference in Vancouver October 20-22nd, 2009.
-Emissions from UK food industry far higher than believed
-Poachers Arrive at Egg Farms
-Striking a bargain: With supply limited, state targets water demand
-Will Anyone Stand Up For American Industry?
-The Key to Local Food Systems’ Survival: Strong Community Support
‘Eco’ packaging
-Google defies Chinese censors after cyberattacks on Gmail accounts of activists
-Public Produce: Filling the Sidewalks with Fruit Trees
-As the World Burns
-Movie Review Friday: The Road
-A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic
-Photo Gallery: Homes for a Changing Climate
Peak oil will force us to acquire new knowledge and skills – The Great Reskilling. These “new” skills are often old skills that our grandparents took for granted. In this spirit, “my” ecovillage-to-be organized three courses this past summer on Building with natural materials, Permaculture Design and Local Economic Regeneration.
Organizing: Movement, Community, Pressure Group?
Greer begins with a serious confusion when he conflates “community”, “movement” and “pressure group”. He is talking about movement building, not community building, when he references the Grange or civil rights.
-Fear of the poor is hampering Haiti rescue
-Why The US Owes Haiti Billions – The Briefest History
-Senegal offers land to Haitians
-Year 501: The Tragedy of Haiti
-Haiti: a long descent to hell
Had Noah built his ark and the Great Flood never materialized, he would have felt very, very silly indeed! Noah could thank God for such an accurate weather forecast. In the biblical story, once the waters receded, God told Noah that there won’t be any more Great Floods, and some of us may still find comfort in this bit of divine dispensation, but rising ocean levels are a fact that more and more of us will be forced to take into account as we redraw our coastal maps.
William Morris offered a radical vision that sounds very much like the radical vision of those now proposing the relocalization of human society in response to the myriad challenges we face to our very survival as a species.
The American press probably hardly noticed but southern France has experienced a major blackout around Christmas and in my own region – Brittany – local authorities have urged people to reduce their power consumption, lest the whole regional grid catastrophically fail. The lights are still on in the small Breton village I am writing this from, but it is probably a matter of time before they go off.
I read with interest John Michael Greer’s recent post, The Costs of Community, and then Sharon Astyk’s response, On the Problem of Community and I wanted to add some thoughts to the flow.
John Michael Greer has a superb piece up about our reluctance to seriously consider real community and organizational strategies. I think it is well worth reading for anyone interested in this question of community – because we have to ask ourselves, if this is the tool we’ve got, why do so few of us want to do the work? Why are so few of us able to do the work?
I get a lot of emails from people who want to get out of the city. Sometimes the reasons are really good ones – they don’t like cities or the ones they live in, but were drawn there by the promise of salaries and jobs, but now see other options opening up in rural areas or small towns. Maybe they always dreamed of land and space to be self-sufficient, or maybe it was a new dream – but now they want to explore it.
