Building Community

Rx for Greece: A dose of Thanatos

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In this essay I argue that the rapid decline of Greece’s health system –and socioeconomic conditions throughout the nation- is proximately due to a fiscal/economic crisis that political and financial leaders have chosen to address by imposing draconian austerity measures upon most of the Greek people so as to: a.) protect the wealth, status and power of dominant elites, and b.) shield and resuscitate a moribund financial system. The distal cause of the deterioration of Greece’s health system, however, lies in reaching the earth’s physical limits to perpetual economic growth. Therefore, attempting to restart growth –the taken-for-granted panacea- is not working and the case of Greece demonstrates that “austerity” has pernicious costs.

The last picture show

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The first thing you do is show a film. It starts with Power of Community. It starts at the 11th hour at the End of Suburbia. You go against your wishes, lured by a love of documentary, and find yourself talking animatedly amongst strangers about Life at the End of Empire, asking whether you can come to the next core group meeting. In these films there is a moment when you realise that life is not the fairy tale you have been taught to believe. It’s the moment you join Transition.

library futures

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The future of the library is, in some way, a paradox. So many of the long term trends are running against it that it is easy to assume that it is an anachronism of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is worth spelling this out. Such trends include the rise of digital technologies, and the accompanying rise of audio-visual culture; the long wave of individualism since the late 1960s; the shift from public provision to personal provision; the pressures on public expenditure; the emergence of the e-book and the digitization of books generally. It seems only a matter of time before the library withers away.

50-State, $25B Mortgage Settlement: Relief for Struggling Homeowners or Bailout for Big Banks?

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The U.S. Justice Department has unveiled a record mortgage settlement with the nation’s five largest banks to resolve claims over faulty foreclosures and mortgage practices that have indebted and displaced homeowners and sunk the nation’s economy. While the deal is being described as a $25 billion settlement, the banks will only have to pay out a total of $5 billion in cash between them. We speak to one of the settlement’s most prominent critics, Yves Smith, a longtime financial analyst who runs the popular finance website, “Naked Capitalism.”

The future – and present – of maternal health care

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Because childbearing decisions are often built on economic necessities, the less certain you are your children will live to adulthood, the more likely you are to have more of them. A longer term stability depends on keeping child, infant and maternal mortality low, even as we struggle with health care costs and the creation of a lower-energy infrastructure.

Review: The KunstlerCast by Duncan Crary

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Outrageous, snarky, “madly engaging,” bileful—these are a few of the terms that have been used to describe author and social critic James Howard Kunstler. But he’s actually a great deal more than these things, as anyone who’s really come to know him, even if only through his books and Internet postings, can tell you. His most personal writings reveal a human, vulnerable, wonderfully versatile, cheerful side that few people know exists.

A different way to spend – CSA style

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Even if we buy certified organic or fair trade marked products it is still very hard to avoid long and large retail chains which contribute to the pressure to industrialise and exploit human and non-human alike somewhere along the line.

How can we combine local, fair or ethical, and organic together in a way that at least has half a chance of caring more for human and non-human alike?

Building the local food infrastructure

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Connecting food to the local economy can provide more people with greater access to local foods.

Making it happen is another story since the necessary infrastructure was gradually dismantled over the past 70 years in favor of a national/global food system that promises low prices, year-round accessibility of products and convenience.

Planning for the Rio+20 Conference: Enter the Commons?

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There is a realization that it is no longer enough to denounce globalization or rail against capitalism. Realistic alternatives must be set forth. For many, it would appear that the commons can provide a useful framework and vocabulary for starting a very different conversation – one that at once addresses politics, economics, culture and our individual aspirations and energies.

The new geography of trade: globalization’s decline may stimulate local recovery

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It is an article of faith that global trade will be an ever-growing presence in the world. Yet this belief rests on shaky foundations. Global trade depends on cheap, long-distance freight transportation. Freight costs will rise with climate change, the end of cheap oil, and policies to mitigate these two challenges.

… In addition to the corporate response, there is a second, more local, noncorporate response. This response is found in the Relocalization and Transition Towns movements now springing up in many developed countries. It is a bottom-up response that includes individuals and municipalities planning for a post-peak-oil future and altering their way of life.

Looking Backward, Looking Ahead

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Some nineteen months ago, this blog launched what I thought would be a relatively straightforward survey of the role of myth, narrative and the nonrational in shaping the peak oil debate. After a flurry of unexpected detours into Seventies appropriate tech, the end of the Space Age, and the theory of magic, just for starters, that survey has finally reached as much closure as it’s going to find. A glance back over the terrain just surveyed is in order, and a few loose ends need to be tied up, before proceeding to the next major theme I want to examine — the twilight of America’s empire and the implications of that massive geopolitical fact for the world.

Keeping the Open in Open Source

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The desire to realise democracy is not futile. Rather, the problem is that real democracy, that is, that mode of governance which is characterised by the unmediated participation of all community members in the process of formulating problems and negotiating decisions, is unattainable once a group is split into a fraction that decides and commands and another that obeys. Such structures make a travesty of the notion of democracy. It is from this vantage point that we must gauge how democratic peer production communities are.