Building Community

HOMEGROWN Life: The Gift of Good Rain

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After months of waiting, worrying and hoping, the clouds finally arrived here at Yellabird Farm last week and brought us the long-sought gift of good rain. It was a great two days of slow and soaking moisture that the cracked soil guzzled up with gusto. Seven inches was the tally. And it has brightened up the spirits of all of us: man, woman, child, goat, chicken, cow, clover, oak tree, frog, songbird. The whole living community around here is crying out with joy.

Sol Food Mobile Farm: Leading the food justice movement to your backyard

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The crew of Sol Mobile Farm is bringing new meaning to the term “food movement.” In June 2012, the team of four started on a sixth month trip. They would travel, they decided, from North Carolina, up the East Coast, over to the West Coast, down to the South, and then back again in a 57 passenger red school bus.

Reflections on my Reconomy roadtrip: Big challenges and big possibilities

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“Road trip” sounds better, but it was of course a rail trip, taking in 10 places over 1,500 miles in 22 train legs in 11 days – from Totnes to Maidenhead, Lewes, Brixton, Norwich, Durham, Dunbar nr Edinburgh, Slaithwaite, Manchester and Hereford then back to Devon…I finish my roadtrip inspired and enthused by the fledgling local economic work that I have seen. It’s planting the seeds of a new local economy and providing extensive learning opportunities. The power of this work so far, as well as providing some jobs for people of course, is that it’s starting to change the story about our economy.

when the left hand knows what the right hand is doing

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Transition groups sometimes meet with the understanding that somewhere in the woolly future “the community” will engage in energy descent. However when you put your own highly consumptive lives under the microscope, the kind of double think and denial that allows Transitioners to talk passionately, for example, about peak oil but still take planes, could no longer happen.

The empty nest

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It has been a long time since I posted here, with many changes. As initiator of Transition action in Los Angeles, and one of the original circle that created the Transition Los Angeles city hub (TLA), I’ve been doing a bit of the “empty nest” syndrome myself. For successful initiators in large areas worldwide, this too is part of the natural and evolving Transition journey of building local community. The empty nest phenomenon is something I haven’t seen discussed much.

Green-washing “sustainability”

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The word “sustainability” sometimes is used to green-wash and promote things that are not sustainable. Genuine sustainability must be evidence-based. But language can be used to conceal rather than reveal. Lets explore as a case study what is currently occurring in the small town of Sebastopol, Northern California.

The simplicity exercises: a sourcebook for simplicity exercises

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This book takes us in a new direction, moving beyond the analytical stage of defending simplicity and criticising growth-based, consumer-orintated economies, toward the recognition that our primary task now lies in actively promoting alternative ways of living through education, not simply research and analysis. Living simply in a consumer society isn’t easy, but it just got easier. [Free online book]

The diggers, the land, and direct activisim

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The Runneymede Eco Village has, at the time of writing, continued in being for seven weeks, despite the bad summer weather and the frequent and inevitable attempts by the authorities to move the Diggers on…The published demands of the participants in the venture were simple and direct. Everyone should have the right to live on disused land, to grow food and to build a shelter: ‘no country’, they claimed, ‘can be considered free, until this right is available to all’. As so often in the past, the question of access to land, shelter and livelihood had led people to articulate demands for a radical shift in society’s attitudes, and to engage in constructive and imaginative direct action to advance their cause.

Peak Moment 217: Portland’s backyard fruit – from waste to feast

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“We look forward to a time when we’re really able to harvest all of the fruit trees in the city that aren’t being fully utilized,” envisions Katy Kolker, founder and executive director of Portland Fruit Tree Project. Volunteer groups harvest trees whose fruit would otherwise go to waste. Half of the fruit goes to neighborhood food banks, and the remainder goes home with the volunteers….From harvesting 8000 pounds of fruit in 2008 to three times that in 2010, this growing project is bearing fruit and benefitting thousands.

The Main Street to recaptured capital

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As a former mayor of Santa Cruz, California, I have had a sustained interest in alternative investment strategies for local communities. Most of the proposals I’ve studied and worked on tend to be either unrealistic about the ability of local communities to function outside of the larger capitalist system, or overly optimistic about the likely economic success and impact of alternative community institutions.

Obols or No Balls

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While policy-makers struggle to increase the flow of money in stagnant national economies they fail to see that it is not the quantity of the money that is the problem but its quality. The imperialist currencies of dollar and euro were designed to serve the interests of elites, so we should not be surprised that they do nothing to support the livelihoods of citizens of countries the world over. In The Ecology of Money, Richard Douthwaite suggested a sophisticated multi-layered currency world, where different types of money played different roles. Although ignored at the time, this may be just the sort of proposal we need now to resolve the crisis in the global economy, and particularly the crisis in the Eurozone.