Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What happens when you ask 14 landscape architecture and three planning students to cut the energy use and consequent greenhouse gas (GHG) production in the city by at least 80 percent — by 2050? How is this to be done? We started by looking at the city of Vancouver as it is now, finding the places where energy use was high and where it was low, and trying to understand why.
I wrote the following letter to my granddaughter, Madeline, who is almost four years old. Although she cannot read it today, I hope she will read it in a future that proves so much better than the one that is probable, and so terribly unfair. I’m sharing this letter with other parents and grandparents in the hope that it may move them to embrace their roles as citizens and commit to the hard work of making the planet viable, the economy equitable, and our culture democratic for the many Madelines to come.
At a time when entire peoples — and species — have lost their homes to flooding, deforestation, war, agribusiness and other forms of hatred and greed, when health has been lost to the increasing toxicity and the decreasing nutritional quality of food, it may be that we no longer have time to indulge in the moral miasma of an urgent need to create a more positive future. Our only time is now, a now that holds the whole complexities of hope and suffering, joy and negativity.
Let’s scrap the misleading language of “creating more resources.” When was the last time you made a fish or some oil? Instead, let’s try and get a real sense of what high oil prices are driving us to do – digging around in our couch cushions for loose change.
-Syria’s Seeds Are Locked Away in Norway, But Are Seed Vaults Safe?
-Localism and prosperity on the farm
-For Schoolyard Gardens, a Global Network
Raymond De Young is an academic who isn’t working for a military think-tank, or explaining why we should just keep climbing the consumer ladder. His new “Localization Reader” will likely fall into hands that get dirty in gardens, and active in your community. De Young is Associate Professor of Environmental Psychology and Planning, in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, at the University of Michigan.
In a recent blog-post sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein writes, “the universities were supposed to play the role of one major locus … of analysis of the realities of our world-system. It is such analyses that may make possible the successful navigation of the chaotic transition towards a new, and hopefully better, world order.”…Wallerstein has developed a world systems model of modernization and empire aimed at creating this better world. It is understandable that he mourns the docile, flaccid, opportunistic, and sometimes destructive contributions of the university as increasing social inequality, militarism, various forms of corruption, debt, unemployment, biophysical forces and natural resource scarcities are decimating human societies…Nonetheless, the historical precedent for such leadership from universities is to my knowledge non-existent.
Architects all over the world have demonstrated the usefulness of buildings which are heated and cooled by design rather than by fossil fuel energy. What has received much less attention, however, is the possibility of applying this approach to entire urban neighbourhoods and cities.
We are in revolutionary times in the specific sense that the governing orthodoxy that bounded what we understood to be practical and sensible turned out to be complete delirium. The analogies with the situation in revolutionary America seem very strong and unforced.
This is the grove I come to each spring, first with the daffodils, and later with the bluebells and red campion. This is the season, between the Equinox and May Day, when England is her most green and exuberant. I love this spring moment. I love English marshes and Welsh hills, the deserts of Arizona, the valleys of Ecuador, the islands of Greece, the forests of Mexico. I have traversed many lands, sat with a thousand flowers and learned their medicine. I have climbed trees, swum in wild water, and spent a big part of my life immersed in the fabric of nature, trying to find words for the wild, the beautiful and the free . . .But what on earth has this got to do with Transition?
Leah Busque, the founder and chief product officer at TaskRabbit, is a former IBM software engineer who started her company to solve a problem she had one very cold evening in Boston. She ran out of dog food at home and wished there was someone she could pay to run the errand. She thought: “it’s a simple problem, there should be a simple solution.” That was February 2008. She went online that evening, registered runmyerrand.com, quit her job at IBM four months later, and spent the next year building the initial service.
The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times.; In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates–the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps–were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.
