Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We cannot “set things right” in the sense of restoring things to the way they once were, but we must begin now to adapt to the new realities if we are to reduce suffering and continue an advanced culture. Today’s article, “Out With the Old”, discusses ending seven unsustainable practices.
America is a car country. We drive everywhere, and we all pay the price: transportation alone accounts for 20% of an American family’s budget, the 2nd biggest cost after housing. A sedentary lifestyle doesn’t just kill our pockets, either — it kills us. After tobacco, inactivity-related diseases are the number one killer in the US. But research has proven that swapping out driving in favor of biking can have wondrous results.
Occupy Wall Street found a new home this week—not a new park, or a plaza, or a square, but a house.
How best do you help a resilient economy emerge in a region that has one foot in ancient ways and traditions – its other in the world of global universities and nuclear power?
Having written extensively on occultism and the esoteric, and himself an adept in ritual magic, John Michael Greer is an eager student of the unexplained. Yet he’s also a sharp observer of the unexamined assumptions that people make about the physical world around them, and how these assumptions have helped land the world in its present crisis. One common presupposition is that nature is independent of the world of human economics, and thus can be treated as a disposable resource. An environmentalist and a devout follower of the druid path, Greer knows better, and he’s written several books seeking to dispel this mistaken dismissal of nature.
They clearly do not want us in the parks. That much is clear after a national crackdown on park occupations throughout the United States. With violent police interventions from Portland to Oakland to Philadelphia to New York (and a lot of other places), this particular tactic may have run its course as the spatial organizing principle, at least for now. We’re also headed into December, and in New York at least, an outside occupation was going to go the way of Valley Forge. So rather than be demoralized, I’d like to see our removal from the parks as an opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, police beating people is never “a good thing,” but it forces us to imagine other ways to channel this energy. Here are some ways people have thought of occupations beyond the park.
Seems like my chapter “The Death of Sprawl” from The Post Carbon Reader is taking on a life of its own. Friday, Christopher Leinberger had an Op-ed in the New York Times, titled “Death of the Fringe Suburb,” which restated concepts I had published (and sent Leinberger last year) namely, that the US mortgage crisis and recession were set off by upsidedown economics of sprawl speculation in US exurbs or “Boomburbs” and we can’t ever do that again.
A group of low-income San Franciscans has come up with a positive, long term solution to the housing crisis that is causing millions of Americans to be evicted and some to embrace the “Occupy Homes” movement: buy the buildings. In October 2011, residents of the Columbus United Cooperative (CUC) in San Francisco celebrated final approval of the ownership of their building as a permanently affordable, resident-owned limited-equity housing cooperative. The residents can now purchase “shares” in the co-op for only $10,000 in the heart of San Francisco (where housing starts at $500,000) to become cooperative homeowners, though most earn less than 50 percent of area median income.
Saudi Arabia announced this week that it is halting its $100bn oil expansion programme, claiming that the requirement for the kingdom to increase production has “substantially reduced” in the face of emerging new oil and gas supplies.
-Come together: Could communal living be the solution to our housing crisis?
-US millionaires say ‘raise our taxes’
-Brightfarms reduce supply chain … to about 10 vertical metres!
-Can a Clothing Factory Stay Competitive While Paying Workers a Living Wage?
The work of mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros continues Christopher Alexander’s work on the nature of architectural order, with more development of specifically scientific aspects. A basic point both make is that natural, biological, and urban systems have a great deal in common. In particular, they all function in complex, varying, and adaptive ways on many different levels. For that reason, they can’t be designed in any very comprehensive way but must largely be allowed to evolve through variation and selection.
Ianto Evans and Linda Smiley at The Cob Cottage Company, in Coquille, Oregon, have created probably the most complete permaculture site in the country. Permaculture sites, including our own, generally emphasize plants, animals and earthworks and ignore building your own home. I am beginning to see that one cannot have permaculture without building your own comfortable dwelling from the materials onsite.
