Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I walk from one part of my property to another as through a continuous wilderness. The vegetable rows, the woods, the pasture, the creek bottom, the little grain- and hayfields are all “garden.” They are all part of the Great Garden that once covered the Earth and might cover it again. As I walk, I pass only from one realm of the Great Garden to another.
Do you know your neighbors? If you don’t, get to know them soon because none of us knows when we might need them or when they might need us.
Several weeks ago I attended a meeting in Montpelier, capital of Vermont, in which that city’s Mayor, Mary Hooper, and Vermont State Representative, Patricia McDonald (R-Berlin) outlined detailed preparations being made by concerned citizens in Montpelier and Berlin to assist the most vulnerable folks in their towns with surviving the cold winter. While this kind of effort may be popular at the neighborhood, city, or town level across America, it is rare that a state representative signs on to it as passionately as McDonald has…
Energy, Climate Change, and Complexity in Healthcare
A Resilient Suburbia 4: Accounting for the Value of Decentralization
The Final Garnaut Report; A Radical Critique of its Energy Assumptions
This is not just another recession. We are reeling from two entwined problems, “Bad Money” and “The Bottleneck” of ecological pressures
An aura of inevitability surrounds the idea of technological progress. And, that aura implies meaningful progress for human society as well. But is that aura in reality merely a paralyzing agent that prevents careful examination of technology and its claims for the future?
Sainsbury’s Britishness test
Revealed: the cruelty of UK’s pork suppliers
No. Just no.
One widespread claim about the current crisis of industrial society holds that it sets the stage for an “evolutionary leap” into a more Utopian world. Does this hope make sense of our predicament, or does it simply wrap the borrowed prestige of Darwin’s theory around belief in a miracle?
Although I admire the Voluntary Simplicity movement, when I was asked to write about simplicity and the economy, I was at first stumped. I can certainly see the grace and benefits of living a simpler life. We already grow much of our food, buy most of our consumer goods used, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without,” try and keep our energy use down to below 1/5 of the average American’s, and depend heavily on community, barter and sharing. At first glance, although we’re Jewish, not ”Plain” our life evokes a simpler past with the wood cookstove that heats our house, the jars of home canned food, the milk goats and our carefully managed budget.
At this historic juncture many of us are not only aware of financial insolvency, but geophysical limits to growth as well. It’s all related. We hold that the consumer economy and its ecological support system are in such dire shape that another cycle of material opulence may not happen.
The U.S. financial system is in collapse, and energy costs are likely to come back again next spring and summer with a vengeance that we can’t imagine. This will make the price of food, already off the scale, skyrocket even further. We must all get to know our local farmers, or better yet, become them. In the moment, we have the “luxury” of low energy prices, and it is during this time that we should be making food security our top priority.
It seems that many of the peak oil heavyweights, including Richard Heinberg and Dmitry Orlov, in particular, despite their own ingenious contributions to analyzing our current predicament, seem to blithely dismiss survivalism. They apparently do not understand the basic technical constructs of survivalism…
Monthly Review: Getting to the root of environmental crises
And now for some refreshing revolutionary anarcho-leftism
