Politics

How I became a “rail fan”

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President Obama’s proposal to spend $50 billion on transportation infrastructure – including 4,000 miles of rail lines – couldn’t be a better expenditure. … Trains are one of the last public spaces left in our society and they also demand a different kind of behavior than we are accustomed in today’s fast-paced, impersonal, high-security, privatized society. You can interact with other passengers you don’t know, feel safe with them, and be with people who are largely respectful toward their fellow travelers.

Pulcinella’s escape

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Pulcinella was the most restless marionette in the old theater. He always had something to protest about. At performance time, he wanted to take a stroll. Or the puppet-master gave him a comic role when he had wanted something more serious.

“One day or another,” he confided to Arlecchino the Harlequin, “I’m going to cut my strings.” And that’s what he did, but it wasn’t during the day. One night he’d gotten a hold of a pair of scissors that the puppet-master had left behind. One after the other, he cut the strings tied to his head, his hands and his feet.

Xenophobia all over the place?

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The dictionary defines xenophobia as “fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.” It seems to be an endemic plague everywhere in the world. But it infects larger numbers of people only sometimes. This is one of those times.

Stories from the mountain-top

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As part of its focus on action in the present–the moment at which oil is peaking–as a time of opportunity for decisive action of historical consequences, the Transition Movement embraces the act of telling stories; stories are a crucial tool for this monumental change–as important, perhaps, as our new-found ability to darn socks and grow Kale. (Part 2 of “Existential Comfort in the Age of Hopkins and Greer”)

The Long and the Short of It: Existential Comfort in the Age of Hopkins and Greer

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…fortunately I don’t actually have to choose between Hopkins and Greer. If I did have to, I would feel that much of what drew me to Transition had been lost to organizational identity and pride. One is only forced to make such a choice when a set of ideas or principles gets mistaken for the foundation or orthodoxy of a Movement. Those of us in Transition should take this as a great warning.

Exponentially on purpose: a century-and-a-half of ignored warnings

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The peak oil debate is a case of history repeating itself: people have been ignoring warnings about exponential use of finite resources for a century and a half. No-one wants to hear the argument. Even International Energy Agency forecasts of record world oil demand, and warnings that the “era of cheap oil is over” made barely a ripple in the media.

Bjorn Lomborg: performance artist extraordinaire

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One of the most successful performance artists of the 21st century has returned to the stage—and we’re not talking about Lady Gaga here.

Instead, I draw your attention to Bjorn Lomborg, who has just unleashed a dramatic reverse back-flip of his stance on global warming that may very well restore him, at least briefly, to the heights of the media firmament he first enjoyed in 2001, when he announced his apostasy from his (alleged) environmental roots with the publication of the global best-seller, The Skeptical Environmentalist.

A world in collapse?

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I wake up every morning in a state of profound grief. We humans have been given a privileged place in a world that is beautiful beyond description, and we are destroying it and destroying each other. I cope with that by building temporary psychological damns and dikes to hold back that grief. … If I weren’t politically active, I would lose my mind. The only way I know how to cope is to use some of my energy in collective efforts to try to build something positive.
(Interview with journalism professor at U of Texas)

Green Wizardry: A response to Rob Hopkins

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Rob Hopkins’ critique of the “Green Wizards” project explored in recent Archdruid Report posts raises challenging questions: some of them about the project in question, others about the relationship between differing efforts to respond to a challenging future. The Archdruid offers his take on both subjects.