Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Like buses, you wait for ages for Energy Descent Action Plans to come along, and then two come along at once. This month sees the publication of two new EDAPs, from Llambed in mid-Wales, and Dunbar in East Lothian, Scotland. These two high quality pieces of work represent two communities taking the idea of an EDAP and rooting it to their place, their community, their challenges.
What would it be like to invest in—not just eat from—the veggie farmers, cheese artisans and ranchers at the local farmers’ market?
As part of the promotion of The Transition Companion, Emilio Mula made these 10 short films of different stories from the book. The recent BBC series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ beautifully told the story of the evolution of human history illustrated by 100 objects chosen from the British Museum’s collection. We used a similar approach to tell the story of the emerging and unfolding Transition movement, which in its short life has spread to 35 countries around the world from its humble beginnings in Kinsale, Ireland.
What do we understand by the term food justice? Is it the search for accessible, affordable and healthy food for all? Or is there a role for food in tackling today’s larger-than-self problems?
Occupy Wall Street found a new home this week—not a new park, or a plaza, or a square, but a house.
Farmers have been through this before — our lives and livelihoods falling under corporate control. It has been an ongoing process: consolidation of markets; consolidation of seed companies; an ever-widening gap between our costs of production and the prices we receive. Some of us are catching on, getting the picture of the real enemy.
The Occupy movement is a start. But the stakes are rising. The earth is dying. The biocidal industrial economy, while coming apart at the seams, still rages on. …And what if the industrial disease DOESN’T die with collapse? What then? And what does that imply for resistance movements?
“The good news is we avoided a train wreck,” said Alden Meyer for Union of Concerned Scientists, who only a day earlier had been forecasting a likely failure. “The bad news is that we did very little here to affect the emissions curve.”
Vampires were quick to point out that climate legislation would be good for humans. “Of course we care about the environment,” said eight-hundred year old vampire Neills Carson. “But mainly, we care about humans – they’re our primary food source. And if you guys are all crowded up around Siberia and Canada, fighting for space and getting drowned in tsunamis and dying of malaria and famines in fifty years or so, well, let’s just say that things are going to get ugly. I sure as hell don’t want to live through another century of the Black Death – do you?”
– The empathy of rats, and their urge to liberate companions
– Localization v. Globalization: A False Dichotomy
– Food for Thought: Food Sovereignty in Europe
– The Water, Energy and Food Nexus
– Dan Ariely on Defying Logic (new)
– Occupy protesters blocking gates at West Coast ports, halt operations at some
– Launching a New Online Library that Can’t Be Destroyed
– (Re)learning the Value of Place and Occupying a Sustainable Future
– The Fracturing of Occupy Wall Street
The power of the Transition to Unsustainability relies on the threat of physical force backed up by the story that there is no alternative: that there is no way of belonging. Here in Scotland (as I am sure elsewhere) that story has been given the lie over the last 15 years as communities on the west coast have taken back their land into community ownership.
