Culture & Behavior

Just in time

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As the recession and Occupy movement encourage people to reimagine work and how they get their needs met in the new economy, Timebanks are catching fire. They are a clever tool to circumvent the scarcity and misdirection of conventional money. Timebanks are at heart a simple concept – you work for an hour, earn an hour credit, and spend an hour with anyone in your Timebank community. Timebanks don’t pay taxes or get penalized in benefit reductions because they are more like charitable volunteering circles of mutual aid or relationship-based gift economies than market-based national currencies.

Food & agriculture – Jan 4

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-2012: The Year to Stop Playing Nice
-New Farmer School
-A Punch to the Mouth: Food Price Volatility Hits the World
-China’s Growing Urban Population Sprouts Urban Farms
-Students Say “Occupy Your Plate”, Plan to Converge at Retreat to Grow Food Cooperatives
-Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals
-Digging Into Potash Stocks

How resilient are we? A New Zealand immigrant’s perspective

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When the time came to pull up stakes, our desire to pursue self-sufficiency meant that a destination with a temperate climate and reliable rainfall was a prerequisite. A job opportunity came, we did our research, weighed the pros and cons, and trusted intuition that this place offered better-than-average odds of weathering the gamut of changes that seemed to be imminent.

Occupy my soul

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The only way to describe what has happened to myself and a number of Occupy Vancouver organizers (and I suspect many other occupy organizers across the world) is to realize that we have been occupied by occupy! We have been captured and consumed by something that we don’t understand but that has served to rock our world; and that we know is something deeply important. Fortunately as we transition to Phase II (post encampment phase), we have some time to reflect.

Entering the fifth zone – 2012

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…In the forest where the passionflower grows, where its leaves have been used as a poultice for thousands of years, the Maya sit in small straw huts and weave patterns of extraordinary complexity, the most beautiful fabrics of the world in all the colours of the quetzal bird. In their imaginations and in their hearts they hold calendars of equal complexity, that rotate at different speeds like the stars around the sun. They have held these complex patterns inside them for thousands of years – patterns of time, of colour, of beauty. They held them before the cities came and after they fell into ruin. The temples did not hold them. The temples never do…

Will the world end in 2012?

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The millenarian prophecies of doom that have rumbled on since 2000 are coming to a head this year, with the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world receiving serious news coverage. Often these reports run alongside statistical analysis of the state of the global economy and appear to have much the same level of credibility. Both encapsulate the feeling of powerless of the modern citizen and the give the lie to the notion of ourselves as rational economic men.

Commentary: 2012 Predictions

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Last year ASPO-USA brought together a host of leading thinkers and their predictions for what to expect in 2011. While not all the predictions were on target, last year’s thinkers and leaders on energy issues were remarkably prescient, accurately anticipating among other things Arab Spring, the flow of energy prices, the re-emergent world food crisis, and the next step in the Transition movement. While foreseeing the future is a delicate exercise, there are real trends that are evident to eyes prepared to see. Here are their thoughts about the coming year. A Hopeful New Year to all from ASPO-USA!

Understanding the Occupy movement: creating social power

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Where the rubber hits the road for the Occupy Movement, I believe, is whether they can turn this incredible mobilization, and with all of its symbolic importance, into a force of social power.

Occupy needs to pull people together, but then to encourage people to organize themselves into affinity groups, of between, say, 5-12 people. This sized group is small enough where people can build personal connections and make decisions that all can abide by, and yet be big enough for folks to engage in collective activities.