nation story
The commons is an old value that’s resurfacing as a fresh approach to twenty-first-century crises such as escalating economic inequality, looming ecological disruption and worsening social alienation.
Building Community
From Totnes with love
The ambition of this volume is the aspiration that motivates the whole Transition movement: nothing less than to remake industrial civilization from the bottom up and from the local level.
Garbage is a terrible thing to waste: How to reach zero waste
It all started innocently enough. Following the Holidays and New Year of 2007 we emptied out all of our garbage and recycling to clean up for the New Year. Many months later (May 14) it was time to put out our first bag of garbage and it dawned on me that in over four months we had only created a single bag of garbage. I wondered where could we take it to if we really dug in? Well …
Privatising public space (2)
In my earlier post a few days ago, I wrote about the background to the widespread privatisation of public space. In this second part I look at some of the activist and political responses.
Changing streets – Nov 16
-A farewell to pavements
-WikiLane – How citizens built their own bicycle network
-Local Economic Implications of Urban Bicycle Networks
After the eviction: What’s next for Occupy Wall Street?
It happens that just hours before, Adbusters magazine—which originally called for the occupation—promulgated “Tactical Briefing #18: Occupy the High Ground.” It suggested that perhaps the time has passed for the movement to be so focused on encampments, and that it might move on to bigger and better things instead. This is a notion that has come up repeatedly in my recent conversations with early organizers; after almost three months, they feel, the movement is starting to outgrow the occupation.
“You can’t evict an idea whose time has come:” Read the post-eviction statement from OWS
Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces — our spaces — and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people — all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. We believe that is a highly popular idea, and that is why so many people have come so quickly to identify with Occupy Wall Street and the 99% movement. You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.
Science wants to save us from ourselves
Many argue that what we’re suffering from is an ‘evolutionary mismatch’ in that our hunter-gatherer brains haven’t caught up with modern real-time problems such as climate change. What we are currently wired to respond to are immediate and easily perceived threats, like stampeding buffalo. According to acclaimed Stanford biologist Paul Erhlich — in his paper Human Natures, Nature Conservation and Environmental Ethics — our nervous systems have perceptual constraints making it difficult for us to comprehend the very real threat of a planet that is slowly heating up.
Health, resilience, and a locavore diet
I love everything about food, from fork to fork, and I adore eating from my terrain. So I recently spent a week trying to eat and drink only from within Sussex as a personal experiment and also to test the boundaries of what’s possible.
Occupy – VOICES – Nov 15
– Why I quit the mainstream media
– Oakland Mayoral Adviser Tells Keith Olbermann Why He Quit
– Faces Of Zuccotti Park: The Columbia Economics Professor
– Occupy Wall Street and the U.S. Labor Movement
Occupy – Showdown at Zuccotti Park – Nov 15
– Police Clear Zuccotti Park of Protesters
– Court Order: City Can’t Keep Protesters Out of Zuccotti Park
– Did Bloomberg do Occupy Wall Street a favor?
– Press Suppression at Occupy Wall Street Raid
The introduction to ‘The Transition Companion’
This book seeks to answer the question: “What would it look like if the best responses to peak oil and climate change came not from committees and Acts of Parliament, but from you and me and the people around us?”
