Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A new book by longtime bioregionalist Stephanie Mills tells the story of one of our forerunners in relocalization’s long history. Bob Swann may be the most important pioneer for a just world whom you’ve never heard of. He worked tirelessly over a long life to bring together practical structures for economic justice, land reform, rural investment and credit, complementary currencies, and education.
The US administration ended its moratorium on deepwater drilling this week seven weeks ahead of schedule. The lifting of the ban – put in place in the wake of the BP Macondo oil well explosion – was greeted with muted enthusiasm from the oil industry…
The hard news is that there is no “Plan B.” The future is likely to be more chaotic than you probably think. This was the primary conclusion that I came to after attending the most recent Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas (ASPO) in Washington, DC in October, 2010.
In 1989, while attending a rally to save an old-growth forest from the corporate saw, I heard David Suzuki thunderously denounce the world’s economists for their stupidity. He accused them of encouraging economic growth while ignoring ecological limits, thus causing irreversible damage to the environment. I soon put my career on hold, returned to university, and began to study this apparently destructive discipline. My journey to the revolutionary barricades had begun.
– Basra in southern Iraq has been transformed – thanks to oil
– Iraq has the oil stores, but does it have the know-how?
– Behind the coup in Ecuador
– Ecuador’s economy under Correa: 21st century socialism or the New-Extractivism? (Alberto Acosta interview)
– What will future generations condemn us for?
– Policy at Its Worst (dysfunctional US)
– Why I was wrong about population
– Living off our capital
– Green Party strong in Brazil
– Syriana: Yours to stream or download
– Look past China’s smog and noise and you can see greener action
The book is a blood, sweat and tears account of life as an elected eco warrior trying to encourage local government to work with communities to make the world a greener place, packed with great case studies and tips for Transition initiatives and Councils alike.
– Ruppert interviews Peak Moment’s Donaldson Oct 10 at 6pm PDT
– Past Peak Oil Travelling Towards Transition Animation
– Pachakuti: Indigenous perspectives, degrowth and ecosocialism
– 7 Steps to Civility this Election Season
– Wake Up Americans: It’s Time to Get Off the Work Treadmill
Indigenous movements have inserted concepts like ecosocialist and degrowth into the formal constitutions of the Bolivian and Ecuadorian states. Some call this movement the “Pachakuti”, a term taken from the Quechua “pacha”, meaning time and space or the world, and “kuti”, meaning upheaval or revolution. Put together, Pachakuti can be interpreted to symbolize a re-balancing of the world through a tumultuous turn of events that could be a catastrophe or a renovation.
This image arose out of frustration with media reporting of billion dollar amounts. That is, that they’re meaningless without context. But they’re continually reported as self-evident facts. 500 billion for this war. 50 billion for this pipeline. Literally mind-boggling amounts of money. So here we’ve scraped reported figures from The New York Times, The Guardian, and other news outlets and visualized them as a treemap (?). So you can see in one place figures that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.
– Costa Rica will pay the price for cheap fruit
– Farm-to-School’s Teachable Moment
– Ellen Thrives On Pinkerton and Hopkins’ ‘Local Food’
– Haitian Farmers: Growing Strength to Grow Food
