Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The deep, transformative changes sketched in the first half of this manifesto provide a path to America the Possible. But that path is only brought to life when we can combine this vision with the conviction that we will pull together to build the necessary political muscle for real change.
Gleaning for good by harvesting unwanted produce from local farms, community gardens, or neighbors’ backyards and distributing this excess bounty to the food insecure is an increasingly popular — and necessary — humanitarian effort for the hungry during tough financial times, as Shareable recently reported.
Across the country, volunteer pickers join forces to collect literally tons of fruits and vegetables that then find their way to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries, as well as senior centers, low-income homes, and school lunch programs.
Do you want to live more efficiently and reap the benefits of a closer community? Cooperative living is a great strategy for getting and staying out of debt while building community, resilience and security in a tenuous economy. But it requires a change in attitudes, and a return to more communal ways of living.
– Forbes: Peak Oil: Net Exports Aren’t Everything
– Portland mayorial candidate reads Kunstler, thinks peak oil is real
– Illustrating the new book “Peeking at Peak Oil”
– Niko Paech: Wir müssen weniger konsumieren
Broken promises and naive expectations — that’s how many people at the McPlanet Conference held recently in Berlin clearly felt about the last two decades of environmental policies as the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth summit approaches — with the UN intending to organise another conference in Rio to mark the event.
For those of you who don’t know anything about crofting, in its heyday it could be seen as a perfect model for Transition…Most crofts consist of a few acres of what’s called ‘in-bye’ land – the actual smallholding itself, on which the croft house is usually situated – along with rights to put livestock out onto the ‘common grazings’ of the crofting township. Crofters now have rights to security of tenure, fixed rents, and the right to inherit or assign crofts pretty much in perpetuity. Recently, the right for crofting communities to buy out their land has been enshrined in an astonishing package of legislation that in an ideal world would mean that crofting townships like ours should flourish.
I spent my Easter weekend this year in an exciting meeting of social movements focused on rejecting the debt at source: on conducting a series of Citizens’ Audits to ascertain exactly how we came to be in this disastrous position and to ask the question, Who really owes to whom? And why should the tiny percentage of the super-wealthy continue to extract such a vast share of the common wealth of nations? This is empowerment as an alternative to austerity.
The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history.
Janaia’s mother Rowena grew up in a blue collar family during the 1930s. The kids helped their mom in her own pie delivery business while their dad did construction odd jobs. In this cash-only society, they lived on what they could pay for. She recalls losing her only pair of shoes and envying a school girl’s daily peanut butter-and-jam sandwich. But she didn’t feel deprived: people generously gave groceries and hand-me-down clothes. Kids entertained themselves with outdoor games, and later, from adventures emanating from the home-built radio. Her frugality, self-reliant attitude and do-it-yourself skills went on to enrich the family Janaia grew up in.
– Jeffrey J. Brown: Instead of “Waiting for Godot”, emphasize vocational and agricultural training
– Learning That Works
– Young Italians flock to become shepherds
– The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
– Lundberg: Humanity’s chances dimmed when many progressives love slave-jobs and cheap gasoline
– Suicides have Greeks on edge
– Chomsky: On the History of the US Economy in Decline
– ‘Hug the Monster’ for Realistic Hope in Global Warming (or How to Transform Your Fearful Inner Climate)
Ernest “Chick” Callenbach, a film scholar and environmentalist who created a cult favorite in “Ecotopia,” a 1975 novel that predicted with uncanny accuracy a world where recycling is commonplace, food is locally grown and energy comes from the sun, died April 16 in Berkeley. The novel has now sold nearly one million copies and been translated into a dozen languages
