building resilient communities

Three Ways to Regenerate Bioregions

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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?

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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

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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

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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.

The Localist Theory of Charles Marohn’s Wonderfully Practical Strong Towns

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In fact, Strong Towns is one of those rare books (Wendell Berry’s classic The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture is another) whose argument itself exemplifies what it advocates for: it builds towards a challenge to the whole way we conceive of its chosen focus by beginning with the most local and particular relevant matters possible.

Liberating Limits: OBG

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This post from almost exactly 10 years ago is like a “report from the front” of my own thinking related to the question: How can Americans fall in love with limits the way we’ve fallen in love with freedom?” Our romance with freedom as entitlement, expansion, breaking (up, in, out), and, when you come right down to it, selfishness writ so large it’s sociopathy, is literally killing the web of life and the cohesion of societies.

The Need for a Greater Vision: Growing a Cohesive Community

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With the support of a community we trust and a clear view of our potential, we can experience the growing crisis as an opportunity to make the needed changes rather than sink into despair or live in fear of the future. With the support of a community we trust and a clear view of our potential, we can experience the growing crisis as an opportunity to make the needed changes rather than sink into despair or live in fear of the future.

The Forgotten Treasure In These American Lands

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This year marks the sesquicentennial of explorer Powell’s expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869. Perhaps more than any other man of his time, he comprehended the limits of Western geography, and suggested that inhabiting the land would require a far different set of rhythms than those we had cultivated up to that point. He questioned the entire orthodoxy shaping the West during his age—an orthodoxy that is shaping it still.

Petroleum Junkies of the World, Unite!

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I’m a fossil fuel junkie. I drive a car and use electricity. My computer, TV, telephone, refrigerator, stove, lights, water, and sewage all run on carbon-based energy.[1] All of the materials used to build my house and furniture were made with hydrocarbons. The wood, sheetrock, cement, metals, glass, wiring, pvc pipes, and other plastics were all manufactured with carboniferous energy. My high-energy lifestyle mainlines fossil fuels.

Backlash

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We should do what the Rojavans are doing, even in the midst of war. We should build up a community of mutual support with our neighbors. We should be willing to sacrifice for the good of all, to hold one another to a high standard, to put justice above comfort, to cheerfully make do with less, to find moments of pleasure in the middle of conflict, to sit down to a meal together, sing together, cry together – to be real people in the real world.