Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What happens to individuals also happens to entire societies. Take a neurotic Peak Oil-denying industrial civilization, put it through a terrible global financial crisis, tell it that economic growth is over forever, and what you get a psychotic, delusional industrial civilization.
As you probably know the 2012 Farm Bill has food stamps on the block. I write a lot about food stamps because they are incredibly important — one in seven Americans uses them. One in four children is on food stamps. When you subsidize food for this many people, you functionally transform the larger food system. America, it turns out, subsidizes food just as many other nations do, because without it, people would be hungry. Although food represents one of the smaller budget items for many Americans, an increasing number can’t afford it. The transformation of our society into one dependent on subsidized food is enormous — and it mostly passes unnoticed.
If someone were to ask me what kind of cause is sufficient to live for in dark times, the best answer I could give would be: to take responsibility for the survival of something that matters deeply. Whatever that is, your best action might then be to get it out of harm’s way, or to put yourself in harm’s way on its behalf, or anything else your sense of responsibility tells you.
-Report: Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Was Man-Made
-Japan’s Unsatisfying Nuclear Report
-Reactor restarts, but Japan’s energy policy in flux
-Shadowlands – photographs & stories from Fukushima
My own favorite movement is called The Movement for Involuntary Complexity. The way it works is, nobody wants to join it, because it just doesn’t sound at all pleasant. But then people find out that they are part of it anyway.
It would be more just to Canute if the term “Canutist State” referred to a wise government that constrained the ignorant attempts of its businessmen and economists to grow forever. With apologies to the wise King, I will perpetuate this injustice because the image of a stupid government serving business interests by trying to countermand nature’s laws is such an apt description of what is happening today that we need a name for it.
A thousand-year-old tradition of farming commons in southern England may be jeopardized as housing prices drive out farmers and render the commoning rights moot. Yes, there are still self-identified commoners in England. BBC radio recently interviewed a handful of the remaining commoners who rely upon the New Forest in Hampshire to feed their cattle, sheep and chickens. The 23-minute radio report focused on how the farming commons is a way of life that has preserved the distinctive ecological landscape – and how this future is now in doubt.
After Copenhagen it was by no means obvious that simply calling upon governments to act would achieve very much. Yet the situation is urgent – so what do we do? The aim of this chapter is to look at options for getting from where we are now to adequate climate mitigation. It starts by looking at all the obstacles to getting things done – but this is not so that we get discouraged and give up. It is so that we are realistic and can find our way around the obstacles.
We think our lives should be fixed and stable, but they are not. We assume our friends should always be our friends, that we should keep our looks, our luck and our livelihoods. And yet life does not turn out that way. And in the extraordinary times we live in, it’s not supposed to either. We are fluid, changing, alchemical creatures, and many of the old structures we uphold, sometimes represented by people in our lives, have to be let go. The dark stuff we have inherited has to be transformed, It’s not the way we are trained to perceive the world, or ourselves; it’s not what our culture tells us is desirable, and yet it is our nature, and, some would say, our destiny at this point in time.
First, to be a hope-monger or a hope-peddler today is not just a sign of weakness but also of laziness, and sloth is one of the seven deadly sins. Don’t forget that, as good Christians, we try to avoid those.
Second, our world is not broken, it is dead. We are alive, if we choose to be, but the hierarchical systems of exploitation that structure the world in which we live — patriarchy, capitalism, nationalism, white supremacy, and the industrial model — all are dead.
Public space is a literal commons: the common ground where people come together as friends, neighbors and citizens. Places we share together—parks, streets, sidewalks, squares, trails, markets, waterfronts, beaches, museums, community gardens, public buildings and more—are the primary sites for human exchange, upon which our communities, economy, democracy and society depend.
In Extraenvironmentalist #44 we discuss the archeology of innovation with Sander van der Leeuw to learn how our complex societies have shifted short-term risks to long-term risks through the application of technologies.
