Culture & Behavior

Welcome to the Social Reporting Project!

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Today begins a grand experiment in Transition — a national blog created and compiled by 12 writers around the country that aims to communicate the real-life issues and experiences of being in Transition. From tomorrow we’ll be posting every day for the next three months on subjects ranging from economics to food to inner change. Each Sunday a guest editor will write on a chosen topic and set the theme for the following week.

The term social reporting was first coined by David Wilcox, one of the media crew at this year’s Transition Conference. He defines it thus: Social reporting is an emerging role, a set of skills, and a philosophy around how to mix journalism, facilitation and social media to help people develop conversations and stories for collaboration.

Why end of growth means more happiness

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Heinberg believes our decades-long era of growth was based on aberrant set of conditions- namely cheap oil, but also cheap minerals, cheap food, etc- and that looking ahead, we need to prepare for a “new normal”. This is not all theoretical. In the backyard of the home Heinberg shares with his wife, Janet Barocco, the couple grow most of their food during the summer months (i.e. 25 fruit & nut trees, veggies, potatoes.. they’re just lack grains), raise chickens for eggs, capture rainwater, bake with solar cookers and a solar food drier and secure energy with photovoltaic and solar hot water panels.

Their backyard reflects Heinberg’s vision for our “new normal” and it’s full of experiments.

Transition & solutions – Sept 27

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– Urban planting: Turning blight into bounty in the inner city (EB’s Olga Bonfiglio in “US Catholic” magazine)
– Chris Martenson interviews Rob Hopkins: “Making The Red Pill Taste Good”
– Hard-core environmentalist who practices the permaculture he preaches
– Portland as a “Resilient Community”
– Green Hands, green heart (EB contributor Clifford Dean Scholz)

Review: The Global Warming Reader, edited and introduced by Bill McKibben

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Bill McKibben’s latest book is a well-chosen and arranged collection of climate-related writings by the likes of James Hansen, Al Gore and George Monbiot, which McKibben edits and introduces. Significantly, the book contains writings by Inhofe and his ilk as well, the better to understand “the lines of attack climate deniers have used over and over,” in McKibben’s words,

Neoclassical economist recants key article of faith

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The element of the neoclassical model that has come under critical scrutiny in the Vermont press lately is the notion that GDP — a measure of the dollar value of all goods and services produced by the economy — is a practical and useful measure of economic well-being. It’s not hard to see why GDP is being re-thought: last month tropical storm Irene dumped tropical-rainforest quantities of water on the state in just a few hours, leading to major damage from unprecedented flooding. Rivers filled their flood plains and kept rising, sweeping away roads, bridges, and houses, ruining homes, lives, farms, and communities. The publicly owned infrastructure is being put back with great speed and efficiency. Is all this public works effort a net benefit to the economy, or not?

GDP says yes, absolutely. Common sense — and steady-state economic theory — says no.

The trouble with apocalypse

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While apocalyptic stories may seem as if they are about our collective path, for the individual they are really about an inward journey. That is why they are quite good at filling movie theaters, bookstores, and churches. And, that is why any appeal to the apocalyptic strain in culture is a wrongheaded strategy when attempting to move people toward actual concrete steps that can improve our collective prospects amid the unfolding calamities of the 21st century.

Thoughts on a sustainable human ecosystem

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In this post, different modeling approaches to gain insights into sustainability will be discussed. We hope that readers will contribute their thinking of what a sustainable ecosystem would look like, and how to map the road towards it. One of the parts of this post is the initial outline of a project to model a human ecosystem from cradle to grave.

CULTURE AND BEHAVIOR: Dangerously Addictive: Why We Are Biologically Ill-Suited to the Riches of Modern America

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Living now in relative abundance, when the whole world is a shopping mall and our appetites are no longer constrained by limited resources, our craving for reward–be that for money, the fat and sugar of fast food, or for the novel gadgetry of modern technology–has become a liability and a hunger that has no bounds. Our nature has no built-in braking system. More is never enough.

Sorting out possible scenarios for the future

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Most Americans are caught up in the Klingons/Cylons distinction in ways that are destructive – the default assumption is a techno-utopianism that doesn’t take physical limits into account, and if they consider any other viewpoint, they assume that the alternative is an apocalyptic nightmare, a Mad-Max-style cartoon.

Neither of these is a likely outcome – we know that we are likely to experience unchecked climate change, energy depletion and economic instability related to both (and to a host of other factors) – there’s little doubt about all of those outcomes. But assuming that everyone will have a single utopian or dystopian experience stands against pretty much all historical evidence. That doesn’t mean no one’s life is ever ideal or disastrous – merely that that’s not generally where most experiences lie.