Building Community

Contamination fears linger for Japanese children, workers one year after Fukushima meltdown

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We go to Japan to speak with Aileen Mioko Smith, executive director of the Kyoto-based group Green Action, as Japan marks the first anniversary of the massive earthquake and tsunami that left approximately 20,000 dead or missing and triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. It was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl…We also speak with Saburo Kitajima, a contract laborer and union organizer from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. “The workers at the Fukushima plant are currently working under extreme circumstances.”

The best of all possible worlds has no use for peak oil

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Psychologist Kathy McMahon (aka “Peak Shrink”) warns people against the impulse to make big changes within the first couple of years after finding out about peak oil. “Don’t make any huge changes.” she says “Do the things that you think are important where you are, but don’t panic and do something dramatic. Let it sink in.”

Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein: a short film

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Sacred Economics (2012) – short film by Ian MacKenzie, a teaser on the ideas of Charles Eisenstein and the return of the gift. Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme – but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.

Knowledge, technology, and the politics of rice

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The dominant focus on advanced technologies and higher-level politics, I argue here, has limited value for understanding crucial elements in processes of technological change that take place in society, therewith touching upon key democratic values. This is illustrated with introduced changes to rice cultivation. Technological change is often associated with innovation.

America: origins of an empire

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To understand how America’s empire works and why its fall is imminent, it’s useful to trace the trajectory of its rise. That’s a complex matter, because the United States may be a single political unit but it’s never been a single culture or country, and its empire emerged out of a long struggle between competing visions of national expansion. To understand those, it’s necessary to begin with the early days of European settlement — and the demographic cataclysm that preceded it.

Occupy the food supply: Construction or protest?

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This February 27 [was] “Occupy the Food Supply” day. It reflects a longstanding call from food activists nationwide to “fix our broken food system.” With 50 million food insecure people in the US, an epidemic of diet-related diseases, a “dead zone” the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico (caused by fertilizer runoff) and a steady stream of E.coli outbreaks from industrialized food, “fixing” the food system seems a reasonable–and urgent—demand.

Goodby Supermarkets!

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Today, in Lewes, we spend about fifty million pounds a year on food and drink and most of that – at least forty million – is spent in our three supermarkets: Tesco, Waitrose and Aldi. In those hundred years – and especially the last fifty years since I was born – we’ve managed to let all this natural capital be diverted into the hands of a few multinational corporations. Our local food economies have dried up; local money no longer circulates around and about the town, building wealth and relationships as it goes. A tenner spent locally multiplies many times over as it circulates. Spent in a supermarket, that tenner goes straight out of town and into the hands of Tesco and co, and its shareholders.