Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This month Transition Training and Consulting has been training (and also learning from) new Energy Resilience Assessment practitioners in the Basque Country of Spain who are associated with the Mondragon group of coops.
-Glimpses of a new ecology of money
-Edible Plant Project
-From Salvaged Tree Trunks Come Very Cool Tables
Part 2 of an interview with the Soil Doctor, Doug Weatherbee. In this interview, Doug talks about soil organic matter, carbon sequestration, how to tend your soil to support either fungal or bacterial populations, and how home gardeners can minimize soil disturbance and increase soil fertility.
In order to help communities in South Africa’s Eastern Cape improve their economic stability and quality of life, Aspire is working to revive small town economies from the ground up, starting with a strong foundation for local farmers.
Current discussions of renewable energy resources often fixate on finding replacements for the highly concentrated fossil fuels and abundant electricity that plays so large a role in contemporary lifestyles in the industrial world. The forms of energy that are actually required to maintain a comfortable human life, by contrast, are food and relatively diffuse heat for cooking, water heating and space heating, and these latter are much easier for individuals to provide for themselves using renewable resources. Moving away from dependence on concentrated energy, however, requires certain adjustments — one of which involves facility with a caulk gun.
What happens if you create 25 small groups to discuss food values and issues, and include a local farmer or food producer in each one? Innovative organizers Judy Alexander, Dick Bergeron and Peter Bates facilitated the “Menu for the Future” groups to support local farmers and educate eaters. Results? Eaters changed their food choices, and the market for local food products expanded. Winners all around!
The more that we can create alternative systems by channelling our consumption and investment and convince others these are great ways of living, and consistent with what we’re trying to achieve long term, I think that’s the way we’re going to succeed.
-How to build a left-wing Tea Party: A guide for Americans
-Life in the Water
-Paradox: Linchpin of the Long Emergency
Articles from last month that we thought were significant.
The recent report from World Wildlife Fund insisting that the world can transition to renewable energy while maintaining current developed world lifestyles and abolishing Third World poverty is simply one more in a long series of loudly heralded cornucopian fantasies well detached from the hard realities of the industrial world’s predicament. The sheer amounts of cheap energy that modern civilization has to hand has blinded too many people to the fact that “vast” and “infinite” are not synonyms — and that blindness has significant implications for the near future.
The permablitz is a short but intense transfer of beneficial energy where members of the community come together to implement a project or landscape installation designed to provide more resources or energy than it consumes, commonly a permaculture design. Operating on a give-help-and-then-be-helped basis, these fun-filled and informative events overcome many of the pronounced barriers facing individuals for implementing regenerative designs and structures.
These communities are adopting laws that, taken together, are forming an alternative structure to the global corporate economy. The principles behind these laws can be applied broadly to any area where corporate rights override local self-government or the well-being of the local ecology.
