A Visit to Titusville: Building Resilient Communities
For over a year now, Transition Centre has been seeking to address what it sees as an emerging challenge: Are we running out of time to achieve a sustainable future?
For over a year now, Transition Centre has been seeking to address what it sees as an emerging challenge: Are we running out of time to achieve a sustainable future?
Today I want to tell you about a really cool project which is a fantastic example of what one passionate individual can do if they put their mind to it.
This article calls for ‘community’ to be led back to its origins and to defend the values that social justice organisers have fought for throughout history.
As soon as you have even just a rough sketch of something that’s optimistic, you then have something that people can react to, the visions can be tremendously powerful in terms of motivating people to make some real changes …
Every morning, Bonita Amaro and her sister Yolanda Sanchez arrive at the Greyhound bus station in Sacramento to greet asylum-seekers passing through on their way to sponsors’ homes across the country.
A bioregion is the integrated system of all human activities within a given area with all of the larger ecosystems on which they depend. It has a shared cultural identity expressed through love of place, shared values and worldview, and commonly understood modes of exchange.
Maybe what I’m about to say is a mistake, considering this is meant to be a fundraising appeal. But one of the constants of our organization since it was founded 15 years ago is the value of honesty. So I’m going to tell it like I see it: we, humanity, are in deep, deep trouble.
I’ve spent most of the past 2 years travelling with my partner Nati, trying to discover what is the most strategic & wise action to take in a world that seems to be accelerating towards collapse. After an enormous amount of consideration, I have a strategy that feels good enough to engage my will and commitment.
Resiliency isn’t about protection from calamity; it is about creating the kind of neighbourhoods we all want to live in. These are places where people belong, have a shared purpose, and serve the basic needs of the community including food, energy, and even jobs.
Suburban catastrophists such as James Kunstler argue that fossil fuel depletion will turn our suburbs into urban wastelands. But we see the suburbs as an ideal place to begin retrofitting our cities.
Our globalised world finds itself caught on the horns of a seemingly impossible dilemma – either cease growing, and so collapse the economy on which we all depend, or continue to grow until we overwhelm and destroy the ecosystems on which we all depend.
This is a book about what it means to be poor. It is a book about what it means to be rural. And it is a book about what it means to be a woman. All three of those things, together, could have meant a very different life for Smarsh.