Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
British police arrest protesters before coal protest
How do environmentalists spot a mole?
Kettling: another special relationship
Rush builds a socialist revolution?
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.
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.
Democracy Now: North Carolina town prints own currency
Boulder’s Transition movement
An urgent call to ‘buy local’
Entrepreneurs building living economies – Colorado conference in May
Esther Duflo, a young French development economist is reinvigorating her profession by pioneering new anti-poverty strategies focused on experiment and evaluation.
My week of living (very, very) cheaply
Green Patriot Posters
Energy Co-op Brings Power to the People
What Can Transition Initiatives Learn from Smallholders?
A bird in the yard is worth two in the shop
Urban Foraging – a Rising, Sustainable Fad
Fighting the recession, armed with seeds
New England’s sugar country confronts a bitter future as the climate warms
Slum cooker protects environment, helps poor
TOD: What are YOU Changing (*if anything), Individually, Locally, Nationally, etc?
Walking restores the world and humanity
Post Carbon Newsletter #48, March 2009
As modernity runs out of resources (those photons sequestered eons ago in fossil form, now released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere) patterns of life naturally retreat to their pre-modern forms. If there are no more sneakers from China, we sew moccasins or whittle clogs. If we are resource-poor but resourceful, we can still weave basket-like shoes out of birch bark, stuffed with straw for insulation, called lapti. If we are truly destitute and feckless to boot, then we go barefoot.
In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse
European workers rebel as G-20 looms
Bageant: We’ve Let Corporations and Media Rob Our Souls — It’s Time to Do Something Meaningful
The killing-fields of inequality
Klare: Global Crime Wave?
Crime down in Los Angeles, other parts of Southern California
Dying alone, drowning in rubbish piled solid to the ceiling
Chinese try to curb ‘plague of desert rats’ in Tibet with contraceptives
