Building Community

The REconomy Project Local Entrepreneurs Conference, Totnes

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The shift towards seeing Transition in terms of the rebuilding of local, resilient economies continues apace. One of the key evolutions in this, a step change in thinking about what Transition looks like in practice, took place in Totnes yesterday. Called the ‘Local Entrepreneur Forum’, it was introduced in the promotional material thus: “There’s never been a greater need to rethink our economy, especially at the local level. Social and sustainable enterprise represents the future, and here in Totnes, we’re not just waiting for the future to happen. We’re inventing it”. The idea was to bring entrepreneurs, investors and experts together, inspire them with possibilities, mix them up and see what happens. It was to prove a heady brew.

Executive order – National defense resources preparedness

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Last Friday, with little publicity, President Obama signed a national preparedness executive order that gives US government (USG) cabinet agencies the ability to exercise total control over what are essentially all the resources of the USA.

In my humble opinion, this could also be the USG’s way of telling us that it knows Peak Oil has arrived, and that the age of energy and resource scarcity has officially begun.
(suggested by an EB reader)

Tackling inequality: a new role for the state

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In the last thirty years, a rising share of the global economic pie has been colonised by the world’s rich. It is this concentration of income that is the real cause of the present crisis. It created the conditions for the 2008 Crash and is now driving us into an era of near-permanent slump.

MOSES Conference: Growing the next generation of farmers

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Strength in numbers! More than 3,600 farmers strong gathered for the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES) conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin the last weekend in February, and it was an amazing experience. The conference featured keynotes by food policy expert Margaret Krome and Food Corps director Curt Ellis, a cornucopia of training opportunities focused on all aspects of organic farming, and a special “Young Organic Stewards” track for newcomers and beginning farmers with specialized workshops and social events.

Biodiversity in Kanazawa: Spring’s Lesson

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The ecosystems around Kanazawa’s urban area have played an important role in giving shape to the physical form of the city in terms of its functionality and aesthetics, and in sustaining its lifestyles. The city’s rise as a flourishing cultural centre was made possible by the diversity of the surrounding ecosystems — from forests to freshwater, to plains and marine environments — which provided it with an abundance of resources and services. As the city’s space was being molded in response to climatic factors, and based on local socio-cultural categories, specific resource uses and practices for managing the biodiversity of these surrounding ecosystems emerged.

Preparing for the unimaginable

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One of the lessons of Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan is that the events that have caused the greatest changes (and collectively most of the substantive change) to our civilization and our way of life were completely unexpected, unpredictable “black swan events. His new book argues that rather than trying to plan and prepare for a future we can’t predict, we should do things that improve our resilience, and create systems that are “anti-fragile”. Unlike most fragile, complicated human-made systems, “anti-fragile” systems (such as evolution and other complex natural systems) actively adapt to, learn from and benefit from upheaval and dramatic change.

Energy in East Africa

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In most East African countries access to electricity is very low. Besides electricity, there is a basic need for energy. In Eastern African countries most of the energy consumed is produced from traditional solid biomasses, such as the burning of wood.

The search for combustibles begins early in the morning, includes several hours of walking, and, in cases where no trees are to be found, digging for roots with bare hands; in some regions this activity is accompanied by the constant danger of violent and sexual assaults. In areas where there is no wood left for burning, cow dung or other waste is used for fuel.

Commentary: I. Collapse? Really?

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Collapse is a scary word, and some people doubt it is even relevant to us. Obviously we are facing some major challenges in this century. Does that mean collapse? What is collapse, exactly? When societies have collapsed, what actually happened? How bad is it? Are there ways of reducing the badness? While historic events can’t give a totally accurate picture of the future, they can at least give us some ground to stand on.

Getting Connected!

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Nature is big and encompasses so many things. Forest, ocean, whale, field, meadow, sky, bird, flower, cow, river, mountain, sun, tree. Human too, though we often don’t think of ourselves as part of the natural world. That’s a big part of the problem. It means we don’t truly see that the havoc we wreak on the living systems of the planet, on all our fellow creatures and plants, we wreak on ourselves, connected as we are in the web of life.

Occupy World Street – a global roadmap for radical economic and political reform: review

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This book by Ross Jackson, published in March 2012 by Green Books, asks a good question: what can we do about the fact that we live in an unacceptably unjust and hopelessly unsustainable world? We know there are many useful things that can be done at home or locally, and by corporations or governments. Lots of examples were suggested by contributors to Fleeing Vesuvius. The trouble is that not nearly enough individuals, local communities, corporations or governments do these things. To reverse current trends the system as a whole has to change. But how? It’s such a huge question that few, if any, other writers have tackled it head on, which is what this book does.