A journey to the end of empire: It is always darkest right before it goes completely black
As the saying goes, it is always darkest right before it goes completely black.
Rejoice in this: Seeds of futurity require the darkness within soil to dream.
Building Community
Less bank-bashing, more action: time to Move Your Money!
A call is going out to every British citizen who wants the financial sector to clean up their act. Move your money from the big banks to local, ethical or mutual alternatives and send them a message in a language they’ll understand.
Why design cannot remain exclusive
The recent political struggles between Hollywood and networked culture underscore a profoundly disruptive fact: exclusive ownership rights are no longer as valuable as they once were. What really matters is the flow. Increasingly, knowledge and other intangible things are more valuable when they can circulate — when they can be freely copied, shared and modified via open platforms.
The Lexicon of Sustainability
Urban farmer. Heirloom. Food security. Methane digester. These are just a few of the terms you’ll find in the Lexicon of Sustainability, a series of portraits that speak the language of a growing movement.
Enemies of the State
As long as we allow proponents of unconventional oil and gas to claim a false choice between energy and economic security and the environment, and as long as we allow them to vilify opponents as being somehow unpatriotic or radical, we run the very real risk of losing a battle where the future of our planet and species is at stake. Ok, so maybe I am being a little bombastic. But am I wrong?
Revitalising socio-ecological production landscapes
For millennia, humans have been interacting closely with nature and building up a wealth of knowledge about effective use and management of local resources critical for securing food, clothing and shelter. As a result, sustainable production systems have emerged over history in many parts of the world, forming so-called “socio-ecological production landscapes” (SEPLs). These landscapes embody many aspects of the green economy concept and provide not only useful indications of how humans and nature have harmoniously interacted in the past, but also guidance on how to transition to sustainable societies built on green economies.
More reasons why we are reaching limits to growth
In a recent post, I talked about why we may be reaching Limits to Growth of the type foretold in the 1972 book Limits to Growth. I would like to explain some additional reasons now.
My prices are not too high: A farmer fires back
Every week during the growing season, my husband and I cart our family’s grassfed meats to market. We sell pork chops for $11 a pound; ground beef goes for $7.50. Every week, we meet someone who tells us the prices are too high. In fact, at those prices, the average net income for our family members has maxed out at $10 per hour. But part of our job is to hold our chins up and accept weekly admonishment for our inability to produce food as cheaply as it can be found in the grocery store.
connecting with our roots – a plants for life talk
But to connect with the plants is to connect with the rhythm of the year, to locate yourself in time and space. It is to connect with the neighbourhood you find yourself in and discover, that even though your world has apparently shrunk because of economics and peak oil, it has in fact grown hugely. It has by your attention to detail, brought memory, fragrance, belonging back into your life, as you notice the limes in the churchyard, the sage in the library garden, the butterburr along the highway. Each plant a small universe with its own story to tell, its own medicine to bequeath.
Peak kitsch: “The Crisis of Civilization”
And, as we’re always saying here at Transition Voice, however compelling evidence may be in a white paper, chart, graph, or long lecture, if it doesn’t succeed in communicating the problem and possible solutions to the problem in a way that engages people, it can end up being of little use except in obscure research or as a footnote somewhere. That’s why we were excited to review a new documentary out of the UK, The Crisis of Civilization, by filmmaker Dean Puckett. In the trailer it looked like the newest, most accessible peak oil film since The End of Suburbia. And once we watched the film, we weren’t disappointed.
The fallacy of the tragedy of the commons
Who owns, say, the natural gas deposits that have lain, untapped, under the ocean near Sable Island, a hundred kilometers from my house? Who owns the Gorgon gas field under Barrow Island off Australia’s west coast? Who owns the methane hydrate deposits off the shore of New Jersey? Who owns the limestone deposits under California’s central coast (deposits that yield up some of the world’s sublime wines)? Who owns the great boreal forests of Alaska, Siberia, and Canada? Who owns the rocks of the earth? Who, indeed, owns the air? The birds of the air? The water? The oceans? Fish stocks? Who owns the whales?
Who owns nature?
Squandering the wealth of life
In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Bank of England staff attempted to estimate the financial costs to the UK economy. In 2009 Andrew G. Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank estimated that the permanent loss to the UK economy from the banking crisis was anywhere between £1.8trn. and £7.4trn.
The softer, less measurable, more human consequences are only just now becoming clear.
