nation story
The commons is an old value that’s resurfacing as a fresh approach to twenty-first-century crises such as escalating economic inequality, looming ecological disruption and worsening social alienation.
The commons is an old value that’s resurfacing as a fresh approach to twenty-first-century crises such as escalating economic inequality, looming ecological disruption and worsening social alienation.
The ambition of this volume is the aspiration that motivates the whole Transition movement: nothing less than to remake industrial civilization from the bottom up and from the local level.
It all started innocently enough. Following the Holidays and New Year of 2007 we emptied out all of our garbage and recycling to clean up for the New Year. Many months later (May 14) it was time to put out our first bag of garbage and it dawned on me that in over four months we had only created a single bag of garbage. I wondered where could we take it to if we really dug in? Well …
-A farewell to pavements
-WikiLane – How citizens built their own bicycle network
-Local Economic Implications of Urban Bicycle Networks
In an epoch when going to extremes has become one of the most popular habits in American culture, the very idea that a middle ground might be a more sensible place to stand is about as popular as garlic aioli at a vampire convention. Still, the obsession with binary thinking that’s done so much to back America and the industrial world into its present corner is unlikely to get us back out of it. With the help of a Greek philosopher, an Austrian mystic, and two famous California cities, the Archdruid explores some of the alternative territory.
The GA, and the break-out groups that meet in the Atrium at 60 Wall Street are blessed with the Quaker tools now refined by waves of protest movements: the Suffragettes, Satyagraha, Lunch Counter Sit-Ins, No-nukes Affinity Groups, and Battle in Seattle. What doesn’t work? Violence. Power Trips. Hierarchies. What works? Good facilitation, timekeeping, note-taking, hand-signs, open agenda, global café, conflict transformation, consensus. What came out of the conventions at the turn of the 18th to 19th Century was protection of slavery, disenfranchisement of women, ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and the preservation of an elite ruling class, especially the banksters. What will emerge from this process may also be flawed when seen in hindsight centuries hence, but it will be progressively less so.
Many argue that what we’re suffering from is an ‘evolutionary mismatch’ in that our hunter-gatherer brains haven’t caught up with modern real-time problems such as climate change. What we are currently wired to respond to are immediate and easily perceived threats, like stampeding buffalo. According to acclaimed Stanford biologist Paul Erhlich — in his paper Human Natures, Nature Conservation and Environmental Ethics — our nervous systems have perceptual constraints making it difficult for us to comprehend the very real threat of a planet that is slowly heating up.
Last week, the flashbulb explosion met the population explosion, as news cameras clicked at several newborns identified as the seventh billion humans in the world. Now that the global birthday party is over, it’s time for new thinking about preparing food for a party of seven billion.
This book seeks to answer the question: “What would it look like if the best responses to peak oil and climate change came not from committees and Acts of Parliament, but from you and me and the people around us?”
Wellbeing should be counted in net terms — that is to say we should consider not only the accumulated stock of wealth but also that of “illth” and not only the annual flow of goods but also that of “bads.” The fact that we have to stretch English usage to find words like illth and bads with which to name the negative consequences of production that should be subtracted from the positive consequences, is indicative of our having ignored the realities for which these words are the necessary names.
I was curious to know what efforts had been made to estimate the size of the informal economy. After some poking around, I discovered Edgar Feige, a widely cited Professor Emeritus of Economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison who seems to have devoted much of his career to this question.
The entire paper is well worth a read…
…[T]he Occupy movement reminds Transitioners that we can’t adequately address peak oil and climate change without democracy and fairness in the economy. Their blogger then goes on to recognize that Occupiers have picked up on their own some of the open ways of the Transition movement: decision-making by consensus and making cooperative action plans to increase community resilience. But not all Transitioners agree that Occupy is a good angle for local groups devoted to making their communities more resilient.