Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
-Greeks ditch middleman to embrace ‘potato revolution’
-International Conference on Degrowth in the Americas
-New Currency Brings Hope to Debt-Stricken City
-A Global Redesign? Shaping the Circular Economy
-A new economic narrative: Industrial revolution 3.0
-Older nuclear plants pose safety challenge: IAEA
-Protesters link arms around the world to decry nuclear power
The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster – One Year Later – Radio Ecoshock
-No Primrose Path
-Australia passes controversial nuclear waste bill
-IAEA: “significant” nuclear growth despite Fukushima
On Ash Wednesday, churches in San Francisco announced they were removing $10 million from Wells Fargo and called on the bank, as per the advocacy group Faith in Public Life, “to put an immediate freeze on its foreclosures and repent for their misconduct.” The March 9 New York Times reported that, “The Rev. Richard Smith of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal church in San Francisco, likened the divestment campaign and public protests to early Christianity’s ritual of ‘reconciliation of the penitents’.” Far from taking place in the private sanctity of the confessional, that rite occurred in public, with the penitent overseen by a priest and required to present himself before a bishop.
Public sector banking is a concept that is relatively unknown in the United States. Only one state—North Dakota—owns its own bank. North Dakota is also the only state to escape the credit crisis of 2008, sporting a budget surplus every year since; but skeptics write this off to coincidence or other factors. The common perception is that government bureaucrats are bad businessmen. To determine whether government-owned banks are assets or liabilities, then, we need to look farther afield.
Annie Leonard is one of the most articulate, effective champions of the commons today. Her webfilm The Story of Stuff has been seen more than 15 million times by viewers. She also adapted it into a book. Drawing on her experience investigating and organizing on environmental health and justice issues in more than 40 countries, Leonard says she’s “made it her life’s calling to blow the whistle on important issues plaguing our world.”
The Left has traditionally been a thought-leader in alternative economics. Many individuals who self-identify as ‘left-wing’ are at their best when providing cutting and insightful macro-level critiques of structural flaws in economic systems, often from a justice perspective.
At their worst though, these critiques can break down into moralistic martyr-complexes underpinned by a chronic sense of jaded victimhood. A side-effect of this can be a muted ability to recognise when and where positive change is occurring.
-EPA’s Proposed Fracking Rules Seen Cutting Gas Drilling
-As NY Turns to Fracking, Farmers Cash In
-Sierra Club Spurns $30 Million Gift as Fracking Turns Toxic
Like bread making, about which I wrote a few weeks ago in the beginning of my Yes, You Can…series, fermentation can easily scare the living daylights out of you. Not only does it operate on the presumption that you’re working with the bacterial world (a concept modern people are taught to fear like the Plague itself) but it also requires that element that we’re taught to believe is in ever short supply: Time. In the spirit of not only bucking those fake obstacles, but embracing them with decided exuberance, author Sandor Ellix Katz has created a little masterpiece with his book Wild Fermentation, The Flavor, Nutrition and Craft of Live-Culture Foods.
This is a post about shopping and a conversation we’ve been having for three years now in my Transition initiatives about relocalising food culture in East Anglia. Because when you’re discussing supermarkets you are really discussing the industrialised food system and the producerist society we live in. It’s a massive topic and one we will return to in our Diet and Environment Week in April, when I’m hoping to write about disentangling ourselves from Big Ag on the micro-level. Right now I’m looking at the macro-level and how there is life after supermarkets. Really.
The word ‘changes’ in the above title will elicit a different response depending on your personality. For some this will be exciting and you will be reading this now to find out what’s new. For others there will be a certain dread, after all – if something is good then, why change it?…
As editors of Energy Bulletin we feel passionately about the site and the issues it covers. We’re excited to have the chance to continue our evolution and invite you to stay with us through that journey.
Following Greece’s recent mammoth 206-billion-euro bond swap, people wrongly believe that the private bondholders of the Greek debt lost money and that the country is on a path to recovery. The only solution for Greece remains a debtor-led default and exit from the euro-zone under the leadership of a radical democrat political movement.
We need to start aggressively deploying all forms of carbon-free power if we are to avoid catastrophic global warming, starting with the lowest cost ones
