Culture & Behavior

Sandhill Cranes!

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Good flying weather it was that scherzo of a morning, sunny, blustery, the sky a brilliantly clear blue vault, rare in our hazy, cloudy metropolis with its often dull light. They rode the strong south wind and sailed along, glittering and flashing in the sun. The heart does leap at such a sight and sound, and even now, typing these words, at the memory. Having come back from the edge of extinction, those big, elegant birds are a symbol that conservation efforts can work, do work, should work, a sign that if we care enough and work at it enough we can bend the grim line way from environmental catastrophe, help it arc toward sustainability and environmental regeneration.

America: modes of expansion

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America’s movement toward empire was anything but straightforward, not least because of the deep divisions among regional settlement patterns sketched out in last week’s post. Those divisions drove an equally profound split between competing modes of expansion — a split that finally exploded into America’s most costly war. Ironically, the mode that won proceeded to make itself obsolete by running headlong into the limits to growth, and thus set the stage for the push for overseas empire that dominated American history in the 20th century.

The Bullseye Diet

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This was an important discussion back when I wrote it in 2007, and somehow, I’ve never re-run it (although it does appear in Aaron and my book _A Nation of Farmers_). It is definitely time to talk more about this model, and I’m hoping to enlist many of you in doing an evaluation of the real productivity of our home gardens and farms – using this as a model. So time to run it again, as a starting point for seeing how much progress the local food movement has really made in the years since it began!

Risk, or why competition is bad for us

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I’m not saying that there is no place for competitive systems in society – there are times when a free market is the only way of reaching an equilibrium of resource distribution within a particular closed system, but at the same time, shouldn’t society recognise the flaw in competitive systems as a means of distributing resources, and instead look at ways in which benefit is felt by all, whether or not they have a competitive advantage?

The narrowing window for a transition to a sustainable industrial society

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Some will say that the window for a transition to a sustainable industrial society has long since passed and that we are destined for an eventual return to an agrarian and craft society. There are two problems with this kind of thinking that have nothing to do with whether it is correct or not. First, almost no one will be able to accept such a message upon the first hearing and perhaps not ever. If you argue something which your audience will likely never accept, you will miss the chance to move them incrementally toward your view.

The best of all possible worlds has no use for peak oil

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Psychologist Kathy McMahon (aka “Peak Shrink”) warns people against the impulse to make big changes within the first couple of years after finding out about peak oil. “Don’t make any huge changes.” she says “Do the things that you think are important where you are, but don’t panic and do something dramatic. Let it sink in.”

Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein: a short film

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Sacred Economics (2012) – short film by Ian MacKenzie, a teaser on the ideas of Charles Eisenstein and the return of the gift. Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme – but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.

America: origins of an empire

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To understand how America’s empire works and why its fall is imminent, it’s useful to trace the trajectory of its rise. That’s a complex matter, because the United States may be a single political unit but it’s never been a single culture or country, and its empire emerged out of a long struggle between competing visions of national expansion. To understand those, it’s necessary to begin with the early days of European settlement — and the demographic cataclysm that preceded it.