Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A recently completed trial led by the Institute of Swedish Safety and Security(ISSS) showed how local currencies could be used in projects to increase the resilience of the local economy and thereby increase disaster preparedness.
The Share Exchange in Santa Rosa, CA is a unique nexus of projects under one roof, created to jumpstart the new economy in the North Bay region.
Farmland LP is a business born from the “uh-oh moment.” The uh-oh moment arrives when you comprehend just how unsustainable modern society has become.
Today, with the global economy massively overextended and teetering on the edge of collapse, many are starting to look again at community-based currencies…
For one of America’s smallest states, Vermont has a lot to teach the rest of the country about living locally.
What would it look like to consume and use resources in a way that does not look the other way?
The logic that because a community couldn’t produce its own MRI scanner there is no merit to the idea of some degree of localisation is ridiculous.
What we now know is that even G8 ministers would rather pass through High Streets populated with small, independent butchers, bakers, grocers, would rather see shop windows overflowing with delicious food, trusting that the relationship they have built up with the shopkeeper over many years…
In Extraenvironmentalist #58 our correspondent Kevin joins us to cover permaculture approaches to our global challenges.
“Because you gave names to everything you found, and came up with logos for bad ideas, and woke up early for conference calls, and changed your car every two years, and it was no progress at all/just a shadow festival/because of that you will have to learn to look at the sky again, you will have to learn to eat food that grows where you live again, you will have to learn to touch what you make.”
The return to an older American concept of government as the guarantor of the national commons, the theme of last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report, is to my mind one of the crucial steps that might just succeed in making a viable future for the post-imperial United States. A viable future, mind you, does not mean one in which any signficant number of Americans retain any significant fraction of the material abundance we currently get from the “wealth pump” of our global empire. The delusion that we can still live like citizens of an imperial power when the empire has gone away will be enormously popular, not least among those who currently insist they want nothing to do with the imperial system that guarantees their prosperity, but it’s still a delusion.
For general audiences and experts alike, this is an engaging, accessible reader that takes an affirmative social change approach to localization.
