Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Victoria Collier and Ben Ptashnik are a couple with a vision: they want to teach how to create self-sustaining ecological community where people can grow food, disengage from destructive systems with the use of renewable energy and green building, and create community projects that benefit everyone while raising the quality of life for the next generations.
We need to use storytelling to show the relationship we humans have with the land—the relationship we need to nourish for our survival.
In my mind what must undergird any energy transition is the building of a new way of being that is made possible by a much lower-consumption world coupled with living more communally.
Much remains to be done if we’re to manage a leap toward real democracy—nevertheless, we’ve kept alive our prospects for achieving an ecologically livable future while fending off a host of power grabs by would-be autocrats.
This article describes a tool called the Tribal Adaptation Menu that provides a set of concrete, practical strategies, approaches and tactics for how to incorporate indigenous thinking into planning, policy, research and interventions for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners.
That there is considerable overlap between permaculture responses to flood and fire resilient design reflects a deep listening to country, holistic and uncorrupted science and old fashioned common sense.
Finding a way out of this “polycrisis” requires a deep transformation in how energy and food are produced and distributed, with actions that challenge corporate control head on.
Sustainability means living as nature lives. It means no depletion of the elements of the ecosystem humans have been treating as economic resources, and no waste. What we pursue is up that tree.
How can we reshape the narrative and shift the paradigm towards different economic systems that promote human and ecological well-being over material consumption?
This fall’s elections are more important than anything that’s happening here at Sharm el Sheikh, I think—the one in Brazil last month, and the ones across America last week, and the one that could come in Georgia early next month.
The project of direct democracy, of which reason and rational deliberation are an inseparable part, has to be made appealing and desirable for a growing amount of people.
Overall the plan of action should be the same: empowering localized economies and grassroots organizations as a way to mitigate resource overuse and move toward an ecological civilization. Any model that begins from the proposition that consumption patterns can remain unchanged is a nonstarter.
