Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Well, it has been Naomi Klein week here at Transition Culture! Here is the film, beautifully produced by those good folks at nuproject, of Naomi’s talk in Totnes last weekend. Amazing they have turned it around so quickly. Here’s the film … enjoy …
Last week’s post here commented on the ways that proponents of nuclear power have tried to put their spin onto a situation that seems to be taking a perverse pleasure in frustrating them. One of their tactics seems to have shifted into overdrive over the last week: the insistence that even though all past and nuclear technologies have turned out to be far less safe and spectacularly more expensive than their promoters claimed at the time, future nuclear technologies not yet off the drawing boards will surely be safe, clean, cheap, and reliable sources of energy. Those of my readers who know their way around the software industry have heard this kind of song and dance before, often enough so that there’s a useful term for it among computer geeks: vaporware.
Talking to people here, it doesn’t seem like people are all that concerned about jobs, about creating jobs out of this. Whereas I think in most parts of the world that’s the first question – how am I going to make a living? Seeing that this could be an opportunity not just for a healthier life with more community connection but that there could be more economic stability than they currently have. That would be a major motivator.
Fabulous feast of apocalypse storytelling set in Thailand. Peak oil, climate change, genetically modified seeds gone bad, new plant diseases, new plagues. … worth reading because of the quality of the writing and that is rare in the apocalypse camp.
On the surface, the nuclear crisis in Japan and the political crisis in Libya (along with at least five other countries in the region) might seem unrelated. But when it comes to our self interest here in the United States, there’s one thing that binds them together: our unquenchable need for energy and the price we pay for that addiction. And there are a few lessons I think would behoove us to learn from this month in hell…
Koichi Yamashita’s four objectives for farming: (1) Be lazy. Save labor by cutting corners and not doing unnecessary work. (2) Be stingy. Don’t spend any money. Forget about the economic system. (3) Be safe. Don’t use poisons on your food. (4) Don’t be greedy with the soil. Determine its actual fertility and don’t try to get a bigger harvest than you ought to by using too much fertilizer. If you understand what your soil can really produce, you will have a stable harvest from year to year.
What is not hoarding? It isn’t building up a reasonable supply of goods before a crisis point (this is only prudent), nor is it attempting to survive and protect the basic health of your family when there is no system of fair distribution. This last is a very important point.
1. Foster community and cultivate networks.
2. Work at multiple levels of scale.
3. Make space for self-organization.
4. Seize breakthrough opportunities when they arise.
5. Facilitate — but give up the illusion that you can direct — change.
6. Assume that change is going to take time.
7. Be prepared to be surprised.
Relocalization also brings ecological advantages. Local production for local consumption often has the potential to restore, at least partially, the integrity of local human-dominated ecosystems.
Abandoning a frontier, however, does not mean defeat. It means adaptation – it means thriving in different ways. In our case, it means that we need to use systems which are simpler and more effective than those which in earlier times had seemed to be the solutions to our problems.
The major part of creating an economy based on ecological complexity, and the heart of what I mean by an ecology of home, consists of embracing these seasonal rhythms, and the landscape and native ecology they create, rather than relying on massive inputs of energy and complex technologies to impose an artificial order on the landscape and to wall ourselves off from the wild green world.
Nobody knows how to define “permaculture.” Everyone thinks they should be doing it. Lisa Fernandes starts the process of deconstructing one of the most common definitions for a system that thousands are touting as a response to peak oil and climate change.
