Building Community

The power of protest tactics: ‘Just Do It’

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Non-violent direct action is not the most glamorous occupation in the world. Unpaid overtime, long hours, maligned by a biased mainstream media, widely misunderstood by the middle classes and opposed by a heavy state apparatus, who could be blamed for thinking environmental activism to be a mugs game. But when the audience at a London preview of “Just Do It: A Tale of Modern Day Outlaws” was asked if they had been inspired to take up direct action after watching the film, many hands waved in the air.

Being the anchor (Pausing for reflection on the Transition Conference)

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One thing I learned from plants, I said to Dan as we headed home to Suffolk and resumed our discussion about roadside herbs, is that whatever you experience in the company of the plant that is the medicine. What makes the medicine is the looking back on that experience afterwards, the dialogue you hold about it and the story you then tell the world. So after the whirlwind three days in Liverpool what is that story?

Some reflections on the 2011 Transition Network conference

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We had a great few days at Hope University in Liverpool. This will not be an attempt at a complete document of that event, you will find the most comprehensive record over at the Transition Network’s conference feed. What I am going to share, with links to some of the key pieces of media from that feed, is some of the notes of my reflections at the end of the conference. As the event drew to a close, I went around and asked people for their brief reflections on what they saw as the character unique to this conference in comparison to others. Three words came up again and again, deepening, focus and maturity.

Towards a post-growth society

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Today, the reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. Productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption: all must go continually up. This growth imperative trumps all else. It is widely believed that growth is always worth the price that must be paid for it—even when it undermines families, jobs, communities, the environment, and our sense of place and continuity.

The power – and limits – of social movements

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We will be organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion. There will be less of a lot of things we have come to take for granted (energy and natural resources) and more of other things we’ve been hiding under the rug for a long time (toxic residue and environmental disruption).

That less/more reality in the physical world will no doubt have an effect on our political/economic/social worlds. It may well be that the liberal tolerance that has been hard-won by subordinated groups will evaporate rather quickly with intensified competition to acquire energy resources and avoid toxic disruptions. A willingness to share power and wealth during times of abundance doesn’t automatically endure in times of scarcity. Scapegoating, a time-honored tactic, is especially useful during hard times.

Summer reading list promotes democratic thinking

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In Follett’s book, you see the hard lives of the Welsh coal miners, the English servants and the Russian peasants. And you see the rulers declaring war, losing millions of lives — usually poor people’s lives. And, of course, as in Victorian novels, the poor people often seem to have more character than the rich.

… It’s not enough to bemoan the decline of democracy or complain about the accumulation of wealth at the top — we need to act. What we learn in Follett’s book is what many of us have learned from experience: There’s nothing so exhilarating or fulfilling as joining with others to fight for what you believe in.

Salvaging energy

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Promoters of electric automobiles and other supposedly green technologies routinely present the energy and carbon savings of their projects as though the only thing that has to be taken into account is the day-by-day costs of operating the technology. The energy cost of manufacture, in particular, tends to be ignored. Factor that in, and what kind of car gives you the lowest carbon footprint? A used one. Setting aside a slice of Fourth of July watermelon, the Archdruid explains.

Shashe Declaration: 1st encounter of agroecology trainers in Africa Region 1

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We are 47 people from 22 organizations in 18 countries (Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, South Africa, Central African Republic, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Portugal, USA, France, and Germany). We are farmers and staff representing member organizations of La Via Campesina, along with allies from other farmer organizations and networks, NGOs, academics, researchers, interpreters and others…Our region of Africa is currently facing challenges and threats that together undermine the food security and well-being of our communities, displace small holder farmers and undercut their livelihoods, undermine our collective ability to feed our nations, and cause grave damage to the soil, the environment and the Mother Earth.

Green energy internships in cutting edge ecovillage

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Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in northeastern Missouri is one community pushing forward their own micro-scale energy research. Like most small villages, Dancing Rabbit isn’t filled with PhD qualified engineers. They’re ordinary people, some with interests in formal scientific research, some with a focus on organic farming or green building methods, so they decided to launch a renewable energy internship to encourage interested engineers and university-level engineering students into the community for a summer.

Arrival of the post-petroleum human (Michael Ruppert interview)

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"There’s a new species evolving. Long time ago, Cro Magnon and Homo Sapiens existed side by side. Cro Magnon went extinct. Now we live in a world with a new species called Post Petroleum Man with a completely different consciousness. That’s the only distinction. We don’t have a different number of fingers, the organs are in the same places. But the evolution is a complete change in the state of consciousness. We’re living essentially side by side, and the new species is emerging while Petroleum Man is rapidly going extinct." (video and transcript)

 

Leaving the casino

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I work with the assumption that waking up to Peak Oil and preparing for Transition is just a special case of awakening in general, and that this awakening requires really looking at the symbols we’ve created and how we relate to them. Casinos provide an illuminating glimpse into the challenges of waking up within entrenched and often tyrannical systems of signs.