Eco Vista: Building a Transition Town in a Student Community in California

By John Foran, Resilience.org

“Eco Vista” was the name chosen in 2017 by a group of students at the University of California, Santa Barbara acting together with long-time community members to describe their vision of turning their rather unusual community of Isla Vista into an ecovillage in the next ten years.  Unusual because 23,000 people live together in an area of just .54 square miles, with eighty percent of them between the ages of 18 and 24.

America’s Love Affair with the Single-Family House is Cooling, But it Won’t Be a Quick Breakup

By Robert Parker, Rebecca Lewis, The Conversation

For decades land use regulation across the U.S. has emphasized single-family houses on large lots. This approach has priced many people out of the quintessential American dream: homeownership. I

Kurdist Rojava: A Social Model for our Future

By Ted Trainer, Resilience.org

Despite appallingly difficult circumstances the Kurds in the region of Rojava are building a society that is totally different from the Middle Eastern norm. Very few people understand that this is the kind of model we must all adopt if we are to achieve a sustainable and just world.

Repent – Another World is Possible

By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog

To repent is to feel such direct sorrow at what you have caused that you turn your life around. You are not passingly sorry. You are sorry for the rest of your days, and come to cherish this sorrow as it reminds you to care about the lives you touch. You may stumble, but you correct course as soon as you are a half a degree off.

Dangerous Nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s

By Kevin Klinkenberg, Strong Towns

Well-done, compact cities and towns are incredibly livable and pleasurable, as well as more financially sustainable. Humans are very adaptable and resilient, and the transition to whatever is next should also give us more excitement than sorrow or remorse. The America of the 50s and 60s is over. The party has long since petered out. That's a good thing. Let’s clean up and move on to something better.

There is an Antidote to Demagoguery – it’s Called Political Rewilding

By George Monbiot, The Guardian blog

If there is a formula for the new demagoguery, there must also be a formula for confronting and overturning it. I don’t yet have a complete answer, but I believe there are some strands we can draw together.

Solar Dehydrator: A Very Appropriate Technology

By Kara Stiff, Low-Carbon Life

There’s no substitute for a mattock and a couple of good shovels, which leverage human effort into great effects with a negligible environmental impact. I love the wood stove, the solar shower, the solar oven, the laundry rack, the ceiling fans and most especially, my new solar dehydrator.

The Lies We’re Told About Appalachia

By Ivy Brashear, YES! magazine

Stories about Appalachia, who tells them and who gets to claim them, matter a great deal when it comes to understanding the place and people more fully. And that understanding is critical, because without a deeper and more complete understanding of Appalachia, it will be hard for its people to build a brighter future that crosses lines of division and works toward parity between race and class.

Three Ways to Regenerate Bioregions

By Joe Brewer, Medium

We need to organize our societies (and all of their material flows) around bioregions. Only then might we learn how to function as regenerative economies that restore ecosystems and heal the Earth. This is what my colleagues and I are supporting at the Regenerative Communities Network. We are mobilizing a growing number of existing efforts to create bioregional economies into a peer-to-peer learning network that shares tools and knowledge to speed up all our efforts.

Retire Early… To Save the Planet?

By Kara Stiff, Low-Carbon Life

But if we plan to reduce our consumption before it happens to us, if we plan to have more time and human energy to give away rather than sell, the impact is softened. If we direct our focus towards making connections and building resilience, and away from making money and buying things, we will all be better off than we otherwise would have been.

Islands in the Flood

By Patrick Noble, Feasta

When I step from the timeless present to time again, the horror would overwhelm me, but for the utopian light, the other side of darkness. Utopia is not fanciful. Our lives are that. It is imaginative and true. Utopia is possible. It is our weakness which makes it apparently impossible.

Big Oil Needs to Pay for the Damage It Caused

By Bill McKibben, Tamara Toles O'Laughlin, YES! magazine

Put another way, those who made their money peddling fossil fuels—the executives and shareholders holding funds—owe something to those who got hurt. It’s not, in the bigger picture, all that different from the demand for reparations by African American descendants of slaves—claims that in recent months more than a few institutions have begun to pay, among a growing number of faith denominations, universities and politicians, including presidential candidates, have begun to publicly endorse.