Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sonoma County can have both green energy and lower rates. The key is to focus on building local solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable resources, and focusing on making all aspects of the energy system, from generation to con sumption, more efficient.
Once upon a time, no one imagined that an American world of home ownership and good jobs, of cheap gas and cheaper steaks, would ever end. Nonetheless, it was kneecapped over the last few decades and it’s not coming back. Not for you or your children, no matter what happens economically. So don’t kid yourself: whether you know it or not, young as you are, you’re in mourning, too, or Occupy Wall Street wouldn’t exist. Unlike the Tea Party, however, you are young, which means that you’re also a movement of the unknown future, which is your strength.
As participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement continue protesting the record profits made by banks bailed out by taxpayer money, a group of grassroots activists are hitting America’s largest banks—including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo—where it hurts most: the wallet. Dubbing this Saturday, Nov. 5 as “Bank Transfer Day,” activists are urging people to move their money out of the banks deemed “too big to fail” into local community banks and credit unions.
-Freedom food: the organic farmers who took on the Italian mafia
-Growing Cities: A Film About Urban Farming in America
-Education in the Desert
Could this film play an important role in turning our culture in a new, positive direction? I’m driven to try.
I like and admire much of Jared Bernstein’s work, but he really doesn’t understand the case for small business. Having spent much of his professional life in the labor-funded Economic Policy Institute, Bernstein comes to most economic discussions with a visceral skepticism about small businesses generally (because many have historically supported Republican policy agendas) and a comfort with large businesses generally (because they are more likely to be unionized). He appears to be largely unaware of new small-business groups like the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) that favor progressive change and embrace labor rights.
– With Generators Gone, Wall Street Protesters Try Bicycle Power
– Chris Hedges: A Master Class in Occupation
– Financial Times: Why America is embracing protest
– ‘Occupy’ Protest at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London Divides Church
– Salon: A New Declaration of Independence
– Tom Engelhardt: OWS at Valley Forge
With more than half the world’s population living in cities we have been told that cites are where humanities future lies. At the same time, awareness of the future challenges humanity faces are growing…The cry has gone out for “sustainable cities” and urban planners the world over are responding. In most people’s (and urban planners) minds cities primarily consist of people to accommodate and methods to transport them…The problem with answering this question is that urban planners have forgotten the fundamental reason thing that allows cities to exist and that will determine their existence in future.
Ironically, while populationist groups focus attention on the 7 billion, protestors in the worldwide Occupy movement have identified the real source of environmental destruction: not the 7 billion, but the 1%
We protest not only at our exclusion from the American Dream; we protest at its bleakness. If it cannot include everyone on earth, every ecosystem and bioregion, every people and culture in its richness; if the wealth of one must be the debt of another; if it entails sweatshops and underclasses and fracking and all the rest of the ugliness our system has created, then we want none of it.
There’s one question that pundits and politicians keep posing to the Occupy gatherings around the country: What are your demands?
I have a suggestion for a response: We demand that you stop demanding a list of demands.
At first glance, Jan Lundberg and Amanda Kovattana seem like unlikely kindred spirits. He’s a former oil analyst turned whistleblower and rock musician, while she’s a British-educated Thai émigré who makes her living helping people become organized. Yet their similarities run deep, beginning with a profound concern for the planet and a flair for writing. Indeed, both are indispensable contributors to one of the top news sites on energy and the environment, Energy Bulletin. Both also happen to be accomplished memoirists, and their memoirs offer rare insights into family relationships, the vicissitudes of wealth and the quandary of being an environmentalist in an environmentally apathetic age.
