Building Community

Japan’s Green Renewal? After the Disasters UN Tour

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I’ve returned from a sobering United Nations-led tour of six tsunami-damaged communities and two radiation-impacted cities in Northern Japan. The obvious conclusion: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident is forcing Japan to go green, including the launch of a new renewable energy national feed-in tariff that starts in July. Meanwhile the governor of Fukushima, Yuhei Sato, told us that renewables will be the “key factor” in the revival of his cesium-laden prefecture.

Review: “The Geography of Thought”

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It was suggested that I read this book because I was looking for a Western proclivity for apocalypse fever. My conclusion after reading it is that change is simply scarier for the Westerner, while in Asia, change is so much the expected norm that it is taken in stride. I would add that Americans tend to spin out their horror far into the future or, as one therapist I know puts it, to awful-ize a situation. Watching Bangkok friends and family face the recent flood crisis with a remarkable amount of equanimity confirmed this for me.

Kick Wall Street to the curb, get $15 trillion

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It was only a matter of time after we started eating local food and Buying Local from main street stores that we’d start hearing about local money…Now, Michael Shuman, the author of The Small Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition (2006), wants to make local investing accessible to ordinary people.

Making local food our future: A community response to the global food system

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Attempts to find solutions to the problems we face in the current climate of economic uncertainty, energy insecurity and environmental concerns can seem overwhelming. One of the biggest challenges we face is that of food security – leading food producers have warned that unless the UK urgently develops a food strategy we will be left relying on imported food and without a sustainable future for British food production.

Our co-owned future

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The explosive force of Occupy Wall Street—and more than a thousand other local efforts—offers hope that a movement committed to long-term change might one day achieve a fundamental transformation of the American political-economic system. Quietly, a different kind of progressive change is emerging, one that involves a transformation in institutional structures and power, a process one could call “evolutionary reconstruction.”

The Transition Companion

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We can do this the hard way or the easy way. The easy way is that you skip this post and buy the book now.

The hard way is that your reviewer attempts to describe a 320 page book whose contents have been shaped by the infinitely varied experiences of self-organising initiatives around the world. In these, thousands of people have explored one question over a five year period: “How do we make our community more resilient in uncertain times?”.

Debt and the Transition economy

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As we navigate The Great Turning, we must create a safety net or “backup plan” as the conventional growth-dependent economic system falters and crumbles. Ideally, that safety net will integrate threads which become the foundation for the new economy — a post-carbon, post-petroleum, post-peak-everything, more socially just, necessarily degrowth economy.

I got the power!

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Personal powerdown within Transition brings a subtle force into everything you do that is hard to quantify. It means that when you talk of energy descent action plans for your community, you know what it takes on the physical and emotional levels, because you have done that descent yourself. You did not “change your behaviour” because you wanted to salve your conscience, or increase your well-being. You made those radical moves because one day you woke up and realised the storm was coming.

There is an alternative

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For as long as there has been such a thing as money, morality and debt have been intimately intertwined. We see this today in discussions about the debt crisis. Do mortgage debtors, credit card debtors, and student loan borrowers have a moral obligation to pay back their debts? Is it unethical for debtor nations to default on their loans?

Higher education under attack

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One can write off the decline of higher education as simply one more aspect of the global chaos in which we are now living. Except that 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.

Preparedness: A good alternative to denial (Review of Fleeing Vesuvius, Part 6)

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Fleeing Vesuvius finishes with an Epilogue (Part 7), in which different authors give practical suggestions about preparing for the eventual collapse of our present energy intensive economic system. The items reflect a wide range of perspectives and priorities.

The impacts of biofuel production in developing countries

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In recent years African countries have enjoyed interest from abroad, thanks in part to a great amount of available land apparently ideal for cultivating crops for providing food security and for the production of biofuels. However, insufficient legal protection for the local population often leads to the signing of contracts that deprive these people of their source of subsistence…And if the locals are in fact consulted at all on the matter, they can typically count on a campaign of misinformation from the government.