Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Across the nation, a robust and inspiring local food movement is gaining momentum but faces critical challenges of overwhelming demand, limited production capacity, lack of infrastructure, and limited access to capital. Meanwhile, as the unsustainability of the industrialized corporate food system becomes increasingly evident, a global food crisis threatens to land on our own shores. Our communities are food insecure.
“We’ve been wrong for the last 67 years,” Mark Gorton, founder of OpenPlans, announced in his closing address at last month’s Pro Walk/Pro Bike: Pro Place (PWPB) conference. “Ok. Time to admit it, and move on! We have completely screwed up transportation in this country. We can never expect to see the legislative or policy change until people understand the fundamental underlying problem. Asking for 20% more bike lanes is not enough.”
Transition groups aim ultimately to catalyse the localisation of their local economy. They strive to move from running small community projects to thinking and acting much bigger. New skills and ways of thinking will lead Transition initiatives to become social enterprises, such as becoming developers, banks, energy companies and so on.
In one neat package of 75 pages, the government-funded Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress provides an excellent summary of almost everything that is wrong with neo-liberalism. Who could ask for a better measure of where proposed leaders stand?
It can be no accident that the main Sunday session of this year’s conference involved the visioning of a high street, the creation of a bustling hub of the everyday businesses and services we imagined to be central to the Transitioned Town of the future. Our high streets, especially those of medium sized market towns, are often a still functioning centre of local trade and a symbol of hope for the Reconomy strand of Transition.
What I love most about this book is the feeling you get that there is hope: solutions to environmental, social and financial crises do exist, they have been tried and tested all over the planet and all we have to do is get on with it.
What we really need is to invest our capital (both financial and sweat) in community-owned, distributed, and small-scale renewable energy. Why? Because we must fundamentally remake the energy economy as if nature, people, and the future actually mattered.
Today we see the woods as somewhere we go to walk the dog, where we have picnics and cycle rides. They have mostly become places of leisure where we take the kids to teach them about nature, gather some conkers and acorns and let them run wild for an hour or so.
While pundits debated failing macro-economic strategies in the media frenzy surrounding election day, students at NASCO Institute shared proven community-driven economic solutions, from coops to alternative currencies.
Vermonter Susan Clark has co-authored the new book, Slow Democracy: Rediscovering Community, Bringing Decision Making Back Home, Eric Becker is Chief Investment Officer at Clean Yield Asset Management in Norwich, on how to invest your money in local businesses, and how local businesses can attract local investment, and VBSR’s Scott Buckingham previewed next week’s VBSR conference.
Our aim was to see if we could estimate the potential value of a new kind of local economy…
October is Co-op Month, and the U.N. has declared 2012 the Year of the Co-op. Two guests give us more insight into why people form and join co-ops, the main barrier to forming more co-ops, and what it’s like to form a grocery co-op in Barre.
