Building Community

Real People, Real Preparation Part 4, with Sarah Edwards

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From the STTP website: In the next few months, Truth to Power will be featuring interviews with individuals who are consciously transitioning to a post-carbon lifestyle…Everyone’s story of preparation is different; there is no one-size-fits-all model. This series of interviews with real people preparing for collapse will honor the uniqueness of those individuals and the methods of preparation that serve them in their particular situations.

Back to school

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On my lap, I’ve got a set of school books that date from the 1850s to the 1890s. They belonged to various of my father’s family – my great-uncle, George Hume, who died long before I was born and studied Eaton’s Common School Arithmetic in Amesbury, MA in the late 19th century, not 20 miles from where I would go to school 100 years later.

Whack!

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The next case of $120 oil, assuming we get there before the industrial economy falls into the abyss, will be brutal for an already over-stretched American consumer. Banks are falling like dominoes on a mule cart over the bumpy terrain of declining energy supplies. When will the lights go out?

The Tropics – A Two Step Transition

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As someone who has spent the past quarter of his life in the lower latitudes, the fancy footwork and the tropical rhythms still present a bit of a challenge on the dance floor. All the same, when I see my peak oil-aware brethren struggling to define and implement the best way to achieve a lower carbon future, I feel a bit of confidence that in this corner of the world, we are a couple of steps ahead of our temperate climate cousins. At times the contrasts are striking, at times comic.

Whose History? Which Future?

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The recent debate between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorth over whether we actually can save the world seems mostly to have degenerated into sound and fury, which is rather a problem, since the larger question of whether climate change is stoppable, whether we can avoid having billions of people die, seems, well rather a good one.

Sacred Shrines and Skinny Chickens

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In the world of climate policy, the argument has been shifting. It used to be between a few global warming Cassandras and hoards of global warming deniers, and that arguing got, well, pretty heated. The deniers long ago lost their argument to the hard science of the matter, so the debate has boiled down to the preventionists versus the mitigators.

Upgrading the Way We Do Politics

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Town hall meetings being held on health care legislation across the country are exploding with emotion, frustration, and conflict. Citizens are showing up in throngs to speak out, and sometimes to shout, about health care—turning the meetings into a vivid demonstration of what’s missing from American democracy.

Settling

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If we are to work on a community level, we’re going to have to use the old community and neighborhood organizing strategies, rather than a series of showings of End of Suburbia or How to Boil a Frog (don’t get me wrong, I really think very highly of these movies). That is, that we are going to have to be able to enlist people at very low levels of commonality, rather than at high levels of education about the future of the world if we’re to get enough bodies on the ground to do what is needed. And that these communities need to be built, well, yesterday.

Watching Myths Unwind

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I want to step back from our gargantuan dilemmas of 2009 and reflect on the East German intelligentsia I interviewed in 1990-1992 at the time of the unification of Germany…these East Germans faced the destruction of their national myth, which held that socialism was the true victor over Nazism and that capitalism’s demise was inevitable. In America unquestioned belief in growth has inspired us throughout our history, yet it is going the way of the East German’s mythology.