Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Cody Lundin imparts details that often pester my mind when thinking about emergency scenarios and in so doing makes me far less cavalier about the more grim possibilities. A great deal of this information would be useful right now for my family in Thailand as they suffer through the flood. Indeed there is a very third world flavor to Cody’s frugal, homemade approaches that speaks to me.
– Growing Protest Repels Troops in Cairo
– Mellower Occupy Movement Grows in the Suburbs
– How is Occupy Wall Street “like” an API / Tim Pool acting as eyes and ears for thousands
– Occupy Maine and decentralization
– An Uprising With Plenty of Potential (Tea Party strategist, professors, Cornell West)
– Here’s what attempted co-option of OWS looks like (Glenn Greenwald)
– Lobbying Firm’s Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine OWS
– Should the Occupiers Stay or Go?
– Awesome (lightshow on Verizon Building in NYC)
– Occupy and anarchism’s gift of democracy
– Occupiers: We’re Already Changing Politics
– OWS-inspired activism
– Corporate change of heart: “The Brotherhood of Man” (video)
– The Keystone Victory
– NYT: Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census
– Zoobombing in Portland, Oregon (video of off-beat bicycle event)
– NassimTaleb: End Bonuses for Bankers
Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley at The Cob Cottage Company, in Coquille, Oregon, have created probably the most complete permaculture site in the country. Permaculture sites, including our own, generally emphasize plants, animals and earthworks and ignore building your own home. I am beginning to see that one cannot have permaculture without building your own comfortable dwelling from the materials onsite.
Although the Canadian Gas Association calls methane a versatile, abundant and safe fuel, its unconventional cousin, shale gas, has been shaking the ground all the way from Lancashire, England to Dallas, Texas.
Today I’m writing a post in solidarity with my fellow Transitioners at GrowHeathrow, who are going to court tomorrow to defend their home. For people who don’t know about this key Transition initiative, do visit their website and look at everything they have been engaged in in the last two years. I visited everyone there last month (Joe Rake in their communications crew is one of our Social Reporters) and it is really a dynamic and friendly place….If you wanted a vision of how the future could be, the kind of future Transitioners frequently talk about or imagine might be possible, you need to look no further. Everyone is welcome.
Every activist engaged in combating human-caused climate change or specific elements of the current energy economy knows that the work is primarily oppositional. It could hardly be otherwise; for citizens who care about ecological integrity, a sustainable economy, and the health of nature and people, there is plenty to oppose…
These and many other fights against destructive energy projects are crucial, but they can be draining and tend to focus the conversation in negative terms. Sometimes it’s useful to reframe the discourse about ecological limits and economic restructuring in positive terms, that is, about what we’re for…
As next June’s Rio+20 summit on sustainable development approaches, discussions about how to effectively establish a green economy are surging. But as a recent conference of the United Nations Institute for Social Development emphasized, the green economy is not simply about the economy and environment. Rather, it requires a deeper restructuring of economic and social processes including people’s relationships with food and agriculture.
Charles Eisenstein, the author of Sacred Economics, gave this inspiring talk to Occupy Wall Street, which is actually about growing “the bright side of the force”. This Star Wars inspired theme I couple with “the handicap principle“, which has a “bright” and a “dark” side; the selfish and the cooperative. Animals generally use just one of these forces in gathering acceptance and status, while humans are capable to use both or choose one. Or they don’t actually choose, they use the part of the force which is easiest to achieve within the current design of our societies. Unfortunately we have chosen to grow “the dark side of the force”, today growing these evil powers mainly through the ideologies of modernism and capitalism. As a result, community is almost gone.
Something happened in September 2011 so unexpected that no politician or pundit saw it coming.
