Money, simplicity, and embracing new paradigms: Quaker tuition follow-up
My recent piece on the cost of tuition at the Friends Seminary in Manhattan has gotten enough play to warrant a response. So here goes.
Media & Communications
Freedom through Frugality
Montpelier resident Jane Dwinell has followed the method in Your Money or Your Life to live frugally and retire in her mid-fifties. She celebrates and elaborates on the method in her new book, Freedom through Frugality. Annie McCleary is coordinator for Transition Town Montpelier, part of the worldwide Transition movement, which helps Vermonters take control of their food, energy, and other resources, while moving from oil dependence to community resilience.
Communications – A new narrative
How do you tell a downstory? Downstories are hard to find in our culture. There are plenty of upstories that don’t work out that act like scary cautionary tales (if you don’t make it to the ball, you never get out of that fireplace and will always wear rags). But how do you go about telling the story of Transition, of the energy descent we have to make as individuals and as a people? How do you turn the coach back into a pumpkin and the princess back into someone who can tend a fire?
The new food movement: politics and pleasure
Food has become – to use an older phrase now being recycled by contemporary activists – the “edible dynamic” at the heart of mainstream economic and environmentalist debates.
Business Development: The Cavalry’s on the Way
Regardless of the industry, "Most companies tend to use the same standard systems and more and more companies arrive at a situation where time and cost have been reduced to a minimum." It is bitterly ironic that so much success could lead to an ultimate failure to find further paths toward innovation and earnings.
Another bite out of life
But one thing is for sure. The malfunctioning at the nuclear plant is but one of the bites out of life stemming from the human failure to recognize, much less plan for, the high price and growing risks of economic growth.
Cities, Towns, and Suburbs: Local goverment in a time of peak oil and climate change
Many responses to peak oil urge individual and community solutions, ignoring government. They argue that since government hasn’t done anything to address the problem, citizens and businesses must take matters into their own hands. Some even argue that government is part of the problem, particularly federal and state governments. This attitude is shortsighted.
Confronting climate collapse
How we think about climate destabilization has a great deal to do with how we talk about it. For example, we do not face merely a “warming” of the Earth, but rather a worsening destabilization of, well, almost everything. We are rapidly making a different and less hospitable planet, one that Bill McKibben calls “Eaarth.”
Turning storm water into productive water
Today, cities face substantial barriers to effective water management due to the sheer extent of non-permeable surfaces such as pavement and concrete. During rain events, the main function of these impervious surfaces is to concentrate and dispose of water as quickly as it arrives, sending it to storm sewers where it inevitably ends up in creeks, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Not only is this poor water management, but unfiltered water can cause major damage to ecosystems!
Financial totalitarianism
And so, the answer to the perennially annoying question “How do I invest my money for it to survive financial, political and commercial collapse?” is this: “There is no answer to your question. Try asking a different question, to which there might be an answer.”
What’s wrong with our food system? Read on…April 5 (updated April 7)
-International Conference on Global Land Grabbing
-Coalition Government ‘must step up to the plate on sustainable food’
-Subsidies and the “True Cost of Food”
-Kenyans fear Dakatcha Woodlands biofuel expansion
-Who feeds Bristol? Towards a resilient food plan
-Huber warns EU president of glyphosate danger to livestock and plant
Peak oil review – April 4
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Conflict in the Middle East
-Japan
-Obama’s Energy Plan
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
