Building Community

So, you know you ARE the 1%, right?

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So with the return of spring comes the return of Occupy, which by and large, is probably a good thing. OWS deserves some props for drawing attention to inequity, for bringing radicalism back, and for showing a very complacent corporate and political leadership that the people still have bite in them. Generally speaking I approve of Occupy.

One of the things I don’t approve of, however, catchy as the framing is, is the “1% vs. 99%” rhetoric. The reason I don’t is that I think it functionally masks really deep inequities — by putting the second percentile together with the 92 percentile, it implies a fundamental symmetry between people who are truly and deeply poor and those who are more than comfortable.

The revolution will not be televised: Quiet drama in Philadelphia

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Why does there always seem to be enough money for military expansion, prisons, bank bailouts and tax cuts for the wealthy, but not enough for education—or for jobs, housing, healthcare, or old age pensions? These are not “welfare” but are part of the social contract for which we pay taxes and make social security payments.

Universities co-creating urban sustainability

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The sustainability crisis has provoked an unexpected and dramatic response from academia. Until now, higher education institutions have tended to focus on sustainability within their own borders. This has predominantly been via sustainability education, research and designing green or carbon neutral campuses. Yet borders between society and academia are dissolving.

Cooperative banking, the exciting wave of the future

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In the dark age of Kali Yuga, money rules; and it is through banks that the moneyed interests have gotten their power. Banking in an age of greed is fraught with usury, fraud and gaming the system for private ends. But there is another way to do banking; the neighborly approach of George Bailey in the classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Rather than feeding off the community, banking can feed the community and the local economy.

USAID to Use Permaculture to Assist Orphaned and Vulnerable Children

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A new USAID project, Permaculture Design for Orphans and Vulnerable Children, is focused on providing long-term food security solutions to orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC) that are coping with the challenges of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Permaculture is their means to achieving this food security.

The little grocery that could

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What happens next in the economy — the nation’s, the state’s, and Seattle’s — no longer lies in the hands of Capitol Hill politicians, the Federal Reserve, or even the boards of companies like Microsoft and Starbucks. It depends on entrepreneurs like Jason Brown, who has big ambitions for his small business. Jason recently opened a grocery store in the heart of downtown Bellevue called Your Local Market. It combines the best features of Whole Foods, like high-quality local and organic products, with down-to-earth prices and familiar brands of low cost cleaning products.

Making the case for economic relocalization

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The term “economic relocalization,” which has been around about four years, describes the global movement of loosely knit Transition Towns and other grassroots networks working to strengthen local and regional economies and systems of food and energy production. I myself was unacquainted with the term until I came across it in the promotional materials for the Economics of Happiness.

The human factor

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It was the enlightenment, certainly, through which a whole host of new political views about public voice and the independent integrity of the individual emerged into the mainstream, even if took another 150 years, or even 200, to work themselves out. And at the same time it was the beginning of the age of extraction, when humankind started to use the stored resources of the planet at scale for their profit and endeavour. Both of these ideas are still the dominant frames of our public discourse, certainly in the richer world, and shape (almost completely) competing arguments about sustainability.

The grind

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The Grind affects all of us, whether the next storm hits you, your neighbor or far away. It affects us in complicated ways as patterns of relocation and refugeeism change, in our insurance premiums and our neighborhoods as houses sell or don’t sell, in our families as we suddenly take in relatives escaping the latest disaster. Right now we can mostly absorb the costs, with only the expected pain – the little things that don’t get fixed, the people who can’t quite make it out of the quagmire. As we go along into a warming world with energy supply constraints, however, the grind keeps coming back, and its drag upon us gets heavier.