Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Antonia Juhasz’s book Black Tide is a devastating indictment of the oil and drilling industry that was responsible. But she doesn’t stop there. She’s also included damning evidence of the role of U.S. politicians, government agencies and regulations that all failed to protect the people and environment of the Gulf.
The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power.
Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it.
Our generation is coming of age with the starkest income disparity since the 1920’s, with climate change already making major impacts on our environment, with student debt creeping towards $1 trillion, with progress on race and gender issues stagnating. We did not create this mess. We are pissed, so we are connecting the dots and we are skilling-up.
The argument is being made that “food sovereignty” is an organising principle so demonstrably strong that it has the potential to transform economic power. Can we really invest in it as the ecological principle to take us into the 21st century?
The truth is that the English still believe that their bank manager is at his desk, drinking sherry, umming and aahing about their overdrafts. In fact, he has long since been replaced by risk software. That’s our national failing. It is endearing in a way, but it’s also dreadfully frustrating. Because it means we’re stuck in the oldest fantasy about money that there is. We imagine that it’s real. And in some ways, this is the source of the crisis in the euro-zone as well. In England, our politicians never argue about this issue — who creates money, where it comes from, what it means — for the reasons I say. But in America, it’s always been the heart of political debate.
Rather than cover what the way down will be like in this post, I wanted to share my thoughts on what one important aspect of life might be like once we reach “down”. That is, the time after decline is finished, when the fossil fuels are gone and society is running almost completely on renewably sourced energies. I explore how peoples’ behaviors may change once they are driven by flow-limited energy sources rather than storage-driven sources in the post carbon world? Flow-limited sources cannot be controlled and stored easily so society will be more effective if it adapts to the rhythm and availability of energy.
It’s a small story. These are all small stories. You might not know they are happening or take much notice of them. But if you were curious, you would discover how that lettuce came to be growing in such an unlikely neighbourhood; why everyone in the carnival was wearing clothes made of rubbish; why the elders of the village were teaching the young people to plough; why Joel Prittie, ex double-glazing salesman, knocked on 1100 doors in the rain in Manchester. If you pulled these stories together, you would notice they all had a common thread. That’s the moment you realise it’s a big story. The story in fact. The story of how people are coming together in the face of difficulties and making another kind of future.
That’s the story of Transition 2.0.
Each year in April, the Goldman Environmental Prizes are awarded to six activists, one from each of the six inhabited continental regions. This year’s winners have overcome tremendous odds and threats to their lives to lead effective protests and carry out brilliant strategies. The inspiring winners give me hope that, on the economic front, we can energize an enormous protest movement in the United States.
I find that I’ve written a lot over the last couple of years about ownership — and by extension, about land and property. Not enough, it turns out, as I read the news this week that the activists who had occupied an education and environment centre in the Forest of Dean, to try to prevent Gloucestershire Council from selling it off, have been evicted. Legally, of course, it is the Council’s to sell. The argument of this post is that it shouldn’t be.
Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn’t feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That’s certainly the case with Patricia Frank’s Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she’s a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.
For several decades Ted Trainer has been developing and refining an important theory of societal change, which he calls The Simpler Way. His essential premise is that overconsumption in the most developed regions of the world is the root cause of our global predicament, and upon this premise he argues that a necessary part of any transition to a sustainable and just world involves those who are overconsuming accepting far more materially ‘simple’ lifestyles.
This essay presents an overview of Trainer’s position. (Excerpt, link to full text)
-France’s small-scale organic farmers celebrate 10 years of boxing clever
-‘Food Forward’ PBS Series Debuts With ‘Urban Agriculture Across America’ Episode
-Motown hopes food will spur rebirth, growth
-Move over cotton, hello hemp
-‘No-till farming’ revolution grows in Indiana
