Building Community

Charles Hall on the biophysical economy & Bill Schubart on resiliency in hard times

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Professors Charles Hall and Kent Klitgaard’s new book is Energy and the Wealth of Nations: Understanding the Biophysical Economy. Hall explained what the biophysical costs of energy are, and why they’re more important than the price. He revealed how his understanding of peak oil helped him plan in 1970 a successful retirement investment strategy that paid off in 2008. This Wednesday, November 16 is the fall conference of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, with the them, “Resiliency in Uncertain Times.” VBSR executive director Andrea Cohen talked about why they chose the theme even before Tropical Storm Irene hit the state, and author and entrepreneur Bill Schubart discussed his take on resiliency. Schubart will moderate a panel on the theme Wednesday morning.

Commentary: The 2011 ASPO-USA Conference: Truth in Energy, Truth in Community

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Media types are fond of saying that if an event doesn’t get covered, it didn’t happen. But this conference definitely happened. And what is created was a general assembly of a community, one that shows tremendous promise as a model for cross-sector collaboration. This kind of collaboration is desperately needed if we are to have anything resembling a soft landing as we head down the fossil carbon mountain.

Local currencies, Transition Councils and Declarations of Food Independence: it must be the October Transition podcast!

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Here’s the second Transition podcast. The idea with these is that they will explore some of the stories from the month’s “Round up of what’s happening in the world of Transition” in greater depth. So, this month we hear from Brixton about the latest developments with the Brixton Pound, from the Wiltshire town whose Town Council just voted to become a Transition Council, and from the Yorkshire valley that recently declared independence from the global food system.

Size of the US underground economy

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I was curious to know what efforts had been made to estimate the size of the informal economy. After some poking around, I discovered Edgar Feige, a widely cited Professor Emeritus of Economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison who seems to have devoted much of his career to this question.

The entire paper is well worth a read…

Occupy your life

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Someone asked “if you could say something to the Occupy movement what would you say?” Vandana Shiva flashed her brilliant and embracing laughing smile, a smile that hooks right into your heart and you can’t help but feel the connection. She replied: “I’d tell them, Occupy your Life.” She reminded us how Gandhi had the symbolic actions — sitting in protests — but with that he also had the cotton — the tangible actions.  Dr Shiva said that along with the protests, people need to grow food, to build connections within their communities, to make changes in their lives.

Privatising public space

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By privatised public space, I mean that space which appears to be a public space (a square or a lane, for example) is in fact owned and controlled by a private landowner (or sometimes managed privately for a public owner.) Either way, different rules apply. It’s a trend which has been driven along by private sector regeneration schemes, and reinforced by a plethora of increasingly contentious public order legislation. But it is all but invisible.

Transitioners debate how to engage Occupy movement

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…[T]he Occupy movement reminds Transitioners that we can’t adequately address peak oil and climate change without democracy and fairness in the economy. Their blogger then goes on to recognize that Occupiers have picked up on their own some of the open ways of the Transition movement: decision-making by consensus and making cooperative action plans to increase community resilience. But not all Transitioners agree that Occupy is a good angle for local groups devoted to making their communities more resilient.

Occupy – Nov 14

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– Seattle Ex-police chief: Paramilitary Policing From Seattle to Occupy Wall Street
– Man Outed As Undercover Cop At Occupy Oakland Condemns Police Brutality, Supports The Movement
– #OccupyWallStreet: A Leaderfull Movement in a Leaderless Time
– Iraq vet: Penn State, my final loss of faith (in the leadership of his parents’ generation)
– Crimson Front: On Occupy Harvard
– Hawaiian musician with ‘Occupy with Aloha’ T-shirt plays 45-minute protest song for Obama at summit… and no one notices (video from Makana)

Ten ways the Occupy movement changes everything

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Before the Occupy Wall Street movement, there was little discussion of the outsized power of Wall Street and the diminishing fortunes of the middle class. The media blackout was especially remarkable given that issues like jobs and corporate influence on elections topped the list of concerns for most Americans.

Occupy Wall Street changed that. In fact, it may represent the best hope in years that “we the people” will step up to take on the critical challenges of our time. Here’s how the Occupy movement is already changing everything.

Throwing out the master’s tools and building a better house

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This movement is winning. It’s winning by being broad and inclusive, by emphasizing what we have in common and bridging differences between the homeless, the poor, those in freefall, the fiscally thriving but outraged, between generations, races and nationalities and between longtime activists and never-demonstrated-before newcomers. It’s winning by keeping its eyes on the prize, which is economic justice and direct democracy, and by living out that direct democracy through assemblies and other means right now.

On a Friday night in Norwich, November 2011

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It’s nine o’clock and eleven of us are discussing climate change. So far we have agreed that in order to mitigate the effects of modern civilisation on the planet’s atmosphere we have to powerdown to a low-carbon economy, de-industrialise our agricultural system and bring equality to bear in all aspects of the human world. You might think this is taking place in a warm lecture hall or meeting room on this November evening, but we are far from such venues…Occupy Norwich is holding one of its evening talks and I’ve come to spend the night here amongst the tents. Like thousands of others I’ve been following the activities in Zuccotti Park and Finsbury Square on-line and I want to find out what it’s like to occupy a space in physical reality.