Building Community

Facing economic insecurity together

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On a balmy September evening in the Bay Area, 27 people gather at World Centric in Palo Alto to learn about the resilience circle movement. Many are already participants in Transition Palo Alto, and bring a mature understanding of the ecological basis of our collective pain. Others come at the invitation of friends, or out of curiosity. They’ve come to learn about local consciousness raising groups that face economic stress together in a supportive setting. As the evening progresses, the group experiences the power of a primal ritual. Some might attend the same event and argue that a ritual never took place. But, like any good story, it always happens when humans tap into the collective wisdom of the faces around the fire.

Liquidity Networks: local trading systems using a debt-free electronic currency

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Around the world, conventional currencies such as the euro, the dollar and the pound are in short supply because of the current economic crisis. A liquidity network (LQN) is designed to ease this shortage by creating and distributing a supplementary debt-free currency so that businesses and individuals can trade locally without needing the conventional sort.

Welcome to the Social Reporting Project!

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Today begins a grand experiment in Transition — a national blog created and compiled by 12 writers around the country that aims to communicate the real-life issues and experiences of being in Transition. From tomorrow we’ll be posting every day for the next three months on subjects ranging from economics to food to inner change. Each Sunday a guest editor will write on a chosen topic and set the theme for the following week.

The term social reporting was first coined by David Wilcox, one of the media crew at this year’s Transition Conference. He defines it thus: Social reporting is an emerging role, a set of skills, and a philosophy around how to mix journalism, facilitation and social media to help people develop conversations and stories for collaboration.

Abandoning the middle class, governments lose legitimacy

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People who care about climate change and peak oil have long despaired of convincing their national governments to take decisive action or even, in some cases, to acknowledge that there’s a problem. Now, the world’s democracies seem to be losing the confidence of their citizens to deal with the economic crisis too.

Why end of growth means more happiness

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Heinberg believes our decades-long era of growth was based on aberrant set of conditions- namely cheap oil, but also cheap minerals, cheap food, etc- and that looking ahead, we need to prepare for a “new normal”. This is not all theoretical. In the backyard of the home Heinberg shares with his wife, Janet Barocco, the couple grow most of their food during the summer months (i.e. 25 fruit & nut trees, veggies, potatoes.. they’re just lack grains), raise chickens for eggs, capture rainwater, bake with solar cookers and a solar food drier and secure energy with photovoltaic and solar hot water panels.

Their backyard reflects Heinberg’s vision for our “new normal” and it’s full of experiments.

Peak Oil keynote by Randy Udall and sustainability conference call for participants

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Randy Udall’s humorous and poignant presentation on peak oil was published today, recorded at the Local Future conference. Local Future invites visionaries, activists, and leaders to apply to the 2011 International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change: Vision, Action, Leadership. Confirmed speakers include Nicole Foss, Dr. Steve Keen, T.S. Bennett, Sally Erickson, Guy McPherson, Jan Lundberg, Gregory Greene, Kurt Cobb, Stephanie Mills and Aaron Wissner. [The Udall video is posted here.]

Transition & solutions – Sept 27

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– Urban planting: Turning blight into bounty in the inner city (EB’s Olga Bonfiglio in “US Catholic” magazine)
– Chris Martenson interviews Rob Hopkins: “Making The Red Pill Taste Good”
– Hard-core environmentalist who practices the permaculture he preaches
– Portland as a “Resilient Community”
– Green Hands, green heart (EB contributor Clifford Dean Scholz)

Peak Moment #202: Collapse of the titans

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Learn from the Soviets — personal relationships are the best currency, says Russian-born Dmitry Orlov, the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. The American empire is following the USSR into collapse, he asserts, with financial collapse happening first, followed by commercial and then political collapse. Dmitry, an America resident for several decades, suggests lowering our needs and expectations and replacing money transactions with barter and exchanges. [Transcript is online]

Wendell Berry’s weapons of mass destruction

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In 2002, talking like a modernist poet, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked Americans to pay heed to “known unknowns” to prevent terrorist disaster. Two years later, a real poet, Wendell Berry, advised us to take the “Way of Ignorance” to prevent ecological catastrophe. If Rumsfeld is a man who tormented people and words alike, Berry is a man who would set them both free. And that could be more dangerous to the status quo than any weapons imagined by Rummy.