Building Community

Wee shall overcome: Tiny houses, big plans

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Americans live in a country in which bigger is often supposed to be better. Perhaps this is why our homes, like our food portions, waistlines, and debt, continue to expand…But the rise of the McMansion–and its attendant conspicuous consumption–has also helped to create the burgeoning tiny house movement, which extols the virtues of living smaller. Like Henry David Thoreau, who built his own 150 square-foot cabin on Walden Pond in the 1840s, most tiny house aficionados cite the sheer satisfaction of paring down to the basics, choosing, as he put it, “to front only the essential facts of life.”

Get on my land! New report shows thousands benefit from community farming

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‘The Impact of Community Supported Agriculture’– has found that CSA schemes are providing multiple benefits to thousands of members, their communities, local economies and the environment. CSA offers an innovative approach to reconnecting people with their food, and helps to build strong partnerships between communities and farmers.

Saving food from the fridge

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Korean artist Jihyun Ryou, a graduate of the Dutch Design Academy Eindhoven, translates traditional knowledge on food storage into contemporary design. She found the inspiration for her wall-mounted storage units while listening to the advice of her grandmother, a former apple grower, and other elderly. Her mission: storing food outside the refrigerator.

Without women there is no food sovereignty

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In the countries of the Global South, women are the primary producers of food, the ones in charge of working the earth, maintaining seed stores, harvesting fruit, obtaining water and safeguarding the harvest. Between 60 to 80% of food production in the Global South is done by women (50% worldwide) (FAO, 1996). Women are the primary producers of basic grains such as rice, wheat, and corn which feed the most impoverished populations in the South. Despite their key role in agriculture and food however, women; together with their children; are the ones most affected by hunger.

A day in the life of a Transitioner

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How does Transition change your life? Utterly, completely, forever. Because if you embrace what it does, in the way my fellow reporter Jo Homan wrote about so beautifully last week, it will turn your life upside down – like a love affair. It will satisfy you in a way no consumer dream can ever do. It will broaden your intellect, it will engage you with the physical world, the earth and your own body, it will break you out of a tyranny of isolation as Mark wrote on Monday, and all the self-pity and antagonism that goes with that state. It will make you empathic with your fellows, connect you with the spirit of the times. And most of all it will give you back yourself.

 

Seeing Berry’s Wilderness again

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Wendell Berry’s powerful book was the first stepping stone in the path that eventually brought me to the Transition Movement. It spoke of the places I visited almost every day, and the book itself had provided protection to those places against development.

It was powerful to me then because it spoke to my loneliness and feelings of failure in society. And it’s powerful to me now because it offers a scathing criticism of the things I’ve come to criticize myself.

The history of carpooling, from jitneys to ridesharing

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The word “carpooling” usually conjures images from the 1970s: service stations warning “No Gas”, lines at the pump, and bell-bottom pants. For many people, carpooling brings to mind quaint notions of penny-pinching habits that went out of style along with turning the thermostat down.

But the history of carpooling goes back almost as far as the invention of the automobile itself, and has endured well-beyond its heyday in the late 70s, according to a publication by MIT’s Rideshare Research.

Will peak oil spell the end of capitalism? (review of Fleeing Vesuvius)

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The basic theme of Fleeing Vesuvius, which is aimed at the growing sustainability movement, is TEOTWAWI (The End of the World as We Know It). The title refers to the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD, specifically the large number of residents who failed to save themselves, despite weeks of earthquakes, gaseous clouds and other obvious signs that an eruption was imminent. For more than a decade, a growing body of evidence suggests that the planet is on the verge of economic and ecological collapse. Yet the vast majority of us do absolutely nothing to prepare for the stark conditions ahead.

Let us be Human: Christianity for a collapsing culture

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I’ve written the sort of book that someone conversant with Peak Oil etc. could give to a friend who is a committed Christian, and explains, not just the basic problems but *why* Christians should be concerned about it, how the real problems arose, and what in Christian terms should now be done.

It isn’t about addressing Peak Oil etc directly (e.g. prepare to use less fuel, advice about growing your own vegetables etc), it’s more about generating the required virtues that will enable those steps to then be taken.

What is energy for?

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So familiar has the social economy of energy become in modern societies, so routine its extraordinardinary wastefulness, so toxic its effects, that the capacity for a better way can be missed. By questioning the how, why and what of energy use, new possibilities – of living, travelling, eating, working and buying – can open.