Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Hope lies in the future. Look at what’s already here. If 61 native nations oppose a tar-sands pipeline, it’s because they’ve survived the last 519 years of Euro-invasive attempts to eliminate their rights, their identities, and sometimes their lives. They’re still here. So are the Immokalee workers. And the feminists. And the climate-change activists. And Nelson Mandela. So are you. Do something hopeful about it, just for the hell of it. There’s no reason not to.
Commons reduce money-induced growth because they make us more independent of money. The more we produce commons, the less we or the state has to pay for goods.
Commons reduce population-induced growth because they are associated with a multiplicity of sufficiency strategies which create prosperity by sharing.
Commons escape the growth compulsion, because all those things that are produced as commons, do not have to be made artificially scarce. And there is no incentive for artificial scarcity because commons are not produced as goods to be exchanged but they foster and maintain social relationships, satisfy needs and solve problems. Directly.
It was the fact that when we met up as a group in these public spaces something happened between us. Something we held in common. We understood implicitly what we were doing and why — sharing stuff, organising events, going through the agenda. When I looked at this working-together in the visioning it looked like an energy field, the kind of energy field you sense when you stand by a hive humming with bees. A hum of warmth and intelligence that allows people to naturally collaborate and make that low-energy downshift happen….You just need to tune in and act.
Our nation needs to make a dramatic re-investment in broadening wealth and opportunity for Americans who have been historically left out of prosperity. Massive government investments of the past that helped reduce the income gap, such as the 19th Century Homestead Act and post-World War II veterans and housing benefits were effectively “whites only.” Since the end of legal discrimination in the 1960s, there has not been a similar mass investment in economic opportunity that African-Americans and other people of color could benefit from as equal citizens.
We have received a tremendous gift – to be alive at the edge of these changing times. It’s not an easy gift, if we look open-eyed into possible futures. Yet within this gift lies the tremendous opportunity (and yes, responsibility) of crafting tools to place in the hands of those who come after, to enable them to shape the world in which they live through their own vision.
The trend of international land grabbing—when governments and private firms invest in or purchase large tracts of land in other countries for the purpose of agricultural production and export—can have serious environmental and social consequences, according to researchers at the Worldwatch Institute.
Just about every North American knows that we live as large as Las Vegas when it comes to consuming oil, electricity or natural gas. We are the world’s fattest and laziest energy consumers (and our growing corpulence reflects this bitter truth). But, hey, we can’t stop snacking, let alone employing more energy slaves.
When I use the words small, open, local and connected, this is my way of telling the story. People can tell it in another way, but the result is similar. Of course it’s a metaphor: having small entities that when connected, become bigger entities. It’s evident that it comes very strongly from the network. But once it appears, it’s not only related to what you can do, strictly speaking, in the network and technologies. It’s a way to imagine the way in which the social services are delivered in society and the way in which we can imagine economies that are at the same time rooted in a place and partially self-sufficient but connected to the others and open to the others.
There’s probably no notion more widespread in contemporary American culture than the claim that whatever the problems driving the widening spiral of crisis that afflicts us, they must be somebody’s fault. There’s probably no notion that would be more derided in contemporary American culture, if anyone were so unwise as to suggest it, than the proposal that the humanities might have something useful to offer as that spiral of crisis worsens. The acceptance of the one claim and the dismissal of the other are not as unrelated as they seem, and the thread of connection that unites them offers a glimpse at some of the crucial issues surrounding education in the age of peak oil.
I have had the great pleasure over the past few months to work with Susana Martinez and Emilio Mula to create a new short film about oral history and Transition. It emerged from the oral histories we did in preparing the Totnes EDAP, interviewing some of those people in more depth. The resultant film, premiered on Thursday night in Totnes, is one I very much hope you enjoy.
Have you ever wondered why we poop in fresh water? In Part 2 of an interview author Carol Steinfeld, we talk more in-depth about human waste as a resource. Carol, co-author of The Composting Toilet System Book and Reusing the Resource: Adventures in Ecological Wastewater Recycling, shares her extensive knowledge about human waste management practices around the globe, how to clear human waste of possible pathogens, and different waste-composting systems for the home.
In the several years or so since peak oil began generating significant literature and debate, it has attracted a diverse array of thinkers. To name a few, there are insiders like Colin Campbell and Ken Deffeyes who sounded the first warnings; a clinical psychologist in the field of “peak oil blues,” Kathy McMahon; an archdruid practiced in nature’s less readily perceptible energies, John Michael Greer; and a couple of highly engaging social critics, Jim Kunstler and Dmitry Orlov. Richard Heinberg’s distinction is that he’s hands-down the most prolific peak oil author, now having written half a dozen books on the subject and a few others touching on it tangentially. His latest, The End of Growth, is yet another grand performance.
