Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A couple of weeks ago I spoke at TedxExeter, a fantastic occasion with many great speakers (have a look at their website as more and more of the films from the day go online). I spoke for the first time in detail about Totnes as a case study, and what, after 6 years, we can draw from the experience of Transition Town Totnes. I hope you enjoy it.
Understanding the nature of our energy basis is critical to understanding where we are headed as a civilization. Unless people have received unusual education to break their conditioning to expect and desire growth, most people are so schooled and immersed in the growth story that they do not realize that there may be other possible futures, especially in the US where growth has been so consistent and rapid. In this period of global resource transition, peoples’ beliefs are separating into a growth continuum of three general belief systems or world views that inform our lives and trace a trajectory for our future.
May Day is a day of liberation — a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it. It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.
“As empires rise and fall and powerful nations grow and then contract, the farmers, the yeomen, the small landholders, the shopkeepers, and the local manufacturers keep on going. […] as often as not, they are sources of technological and cultural innovation and, from a sustainability perspective, they innovate largely in direct connection with the land and with each other.”
Here’s a crazy but true fact: negative externalities are the norm — not the exception — in our current economic setup. Failure to recognize this fact has created a wild divergence between theory and practice when it comes to managing harm caused by economic activity.
An underappreciated characteristic of co-ops is that nearly all of them fit our definition of locally owned—that is, probably 99.9 percent are connected to a particular place and owned by geographically proximate members. Even large co-ops that sprawl across the country have many of the characteristics of local businesses….Adam Schwartz, vice president for public affairs and member services for the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA), says, “No matter how large a cooperative is, because it is owned by the individual farmers or individual consumers or small businesses, I feel very comfortable making a case that co-ops in any form support local business.”
The sudden disruption of the financial system, which became apparent in 2008, is affecting many people already. However the greatest impacts of ‘peak money’ may yet unfold. ‘Peak money’ could change many aspects of ‘normal’ life, from the personal to the governmental level, much as peak oil and climate change do, but in a much more abrupt way. The Transition movement needs to think through consequences and responses. What are we doing in our communities to create economic resilience and where are the gaps? What might our response be when governments make sweeping changes in services or propose draconian measures?
To mark the release of In Transition 2.0 — an inspirational film about communities printing their own money, growing food, localising their economies and setting up community power stations — I spoke to Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition Network and Transition Totnes, about energy ownership, cooperative finance strategies, and how storytelling can change our expectations of ourselves and our communities.
The fact that economists were at the podium questioning the equivalence of happiness and GDP is a hopeful sign, a sign of a deep crack in the foundation of the economics discipline. But it is one thing to say there is more to happiness than economic growth; it is quite another to propose that economic growth is inimical to generalized happiness. None of the speakers advocated an end to growth – that would be called, in the present vocabulary, economic stagnation or recession. Instead, they invoked, again and again, “sustainable development,” a phrase I must have heard 30 times.
A new report has just been published which ought to provoke a Copernican revolution in dominant conceptions of renewable energy and of sustainability more generally. The message may not be one that environmentalists want to hear, but it is one that we must all take very seriously, or risk having our good intentions dedicated to goals that cannot actually solve the very real environmental crises that we face.
If we don’t watch ourselves, we’ll fail to pause and experience one of the most beautiful and fulfilling times in this annual cycle of seasons we call a year: spring’s boom of wild edibles.
One of the unsung advantages of being in love with a garden or a farm is that the lover doesn’t mind staying home and by doing so, saving gobs of money. In fact most of us land lovers much prefer to stay home… With 30 acres, I never want for a changing world to travel through, a journey not far in miles but almost infinite in terms of material wonders and splendors deep down into the earth and high up into the ever-changing beauty of the sky.
