Education

Can Totnes and District House Itself? The potential of local building materials to build resilience

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In the same way the local food movement shifts its focus from out-of-season, long supply chain, high embodied energy foods towards more locally sourced, low impact foods rooted in the local region or ‘foodshed’, an emerging branch of architecture and construction examine similar transitions with building materials.

Ignoble strife

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There was a difficult choice of entertainment for me on Thursday night. We had a meeting about the cuts here in town organised by the the Socialist Workers Party while Channel 4 was advertising a professional butchery job on the green movement. I think I made the right choice: I spent Thursday evening watching John Schlesinger’s 1967 film version of the Hardy classic Far From the Madding Crowd.

Climate & biodiversity – Nov 7

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– Monbiot: We’ve been conned. The deal to save the natural world never happened
– UN report warns of threat to human progress from climate change
– Climate change challenge for computer gamers
– NYT: Global Warming for Gamers (text and video)

Peak Moment 183: Coping with the decline

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This time Janaia’s in the hot seat! In this interview by Jim Fritz on Port Townsend Television, she tackles corporate control and a dysfunctional system that profits from increasing unhealthiness and consuming the planet. She points to Peak Moment guests as models for the average family to gain genuine security. They’re withdrawing from the money system, growing food, and joining neighbors to prepare for emergencies.

My kids eat snails

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It is not so important to me that my kids can explain the significance of a locavore diet at their age. But I do want them to know what food is supposed to taste like when it is a product of a healthy ecosystem. I want them to experience what their bodies feel like when they are nourished in a way that is in harmony with the Earth.

Post carbon university

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The Post Carbon Reader feels like a Chicago book. I know that it’s really a West Coast production, with its eponymous institute located north of the San Francisco Bay area. But this book forsakes the Cassandra cry of a Berkeley activist at a giant redwood tree-sit. Likewise missing is the smooth scenario-spinning of a Silicon Valley venture capitalist at a TED conference. It’s an encyclopedia that seems more at home among the leering gargoyles and faux-Gothic spires of Hyde Park than on the sun-kissed lanes of Sonoma wine country.