Transition – Apr 24
Dark optmism: Jamais Cascio on The Transition Timeline
Transition Towns and participatory problem solving
Do Worry. Be Happy.
Building Community
A beguiling veneer of normalcy
Are we at the beginning of an epic Depression, or at the bottom of a nasty recession with brighter days only months away? … These reasons for concern pale in importance before the deeper, more profound and systemic problems of our time.
Healthy addictions
I don’t believe we can keep from becoming addicted to something. Once we accept this fact of life, the issue becomes whether we can work on controlling what we are addicted to–making it healthy and inexpensive rather than destructive and costly.
The schizophrenic dance of hope & fear
In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, there’s a lengthy article on the relatively recent arrival of the Transition Town movement to the United States, focusing on organizing efforts in the small, town of Sandpoint, in the very northern tip of Idaho. Despite some flaws, I think the article is quite valuable, and for one reason… the descriptions of what I believe are very healthy, very human tensions between hope and fear.
United States – Apr 21
EPA Finds Greenhouse Gases Pose Threat to Public Health, Welfare / Proposed Finding Comes in Response to 2007 Supreme Court Ruling
Obama signals US rail revolution
Portland, Multnomah County unveil 40-year climate plan
Solutions & sustainability – Apr 21
Is conflict prevention “green”?
Lose weight to help the planet, researchers recommend
Are the Life-boats Sinking
D.C. Area Families Take Green to the ExtremeHow Green Is My Bottle?
Deep thought – April 20
The end is near! (Yay!) (NY TImes on the Transition Movement)
Why we forgot how to grow food (UK Times)
Homer-Dixon: A doomsayer, and a father, with a heart of faint hope
Are there demand limits to growth?
Why isn’t the brain green?
The end is near! (Yay!)
For a wide range of not-always-consistent reasons, people in Sandpoint decided that Transition could help them build the world they wanted. And now, only because enough people stepped forward and made that decision, Transition actually looked like a good tool for the job. They were picking it up by whatever handle they grasped. They were swinging it as earnestly as they could. (excerpts from an excellent article on the Transition Movement)
Does Rick Perry see the future?
As it becomes impractical or impossible to provide massive federal aid to states on a continuous basis, the necessity to find local solutions to a persistent crisis may become more acute. For this reason an ongoing economic slump may end up feeding continued calls for secession as well as create receptivity to genuinely useful relocalization efforts.
Protest – April 18
British police arrest protesters before coal protest
How do environmentalists spot a mole?
Kettling: another special relationship
Rush builds a socialist revolution?
Formulating a future: the case for anti-modernism (part 1)
It is this that my readership has in common – anti-modernism, a fundamental skepticism that economic growth, more energy, more technology, more shiny things, minor economic social change and other incremental variations on the same basic themes can resolve the deeper problems.
Pathways to community collapse: can we intervene?
In the early stages of distress, appeals to the “common good” or “cooperative engagement” may be met warmly and enthusiastically by townspeople. However, there are predictable changes as hardship, deprivation and even violence escalates, which impacts on this spirit of altruism.
