Copenhagen Shmopenhagen
December 18, 2009
Don’t worry! Climate Change will reduce greenhouse gas emissions! Rising sea levels will inundate cities along coastlines which will result in the partial collapse of industrial civilization and those doomsday “business as usual” forecasts will never happen! Think food. Think soil. Think compost. As of now, we are dependent on industrial civilization for absolutely everything. So get ready.
“Greenhorns: Building a Movement of Young Farmers”
June 14, 2009
This is America, and it takes all kinds. All over the country we have met enterprising, hopeful greenhorns: descendants of family dairies, punky inner-city gardeners, homesteaders, radical Christians, anarcho-activists, ex-suburbanites, graduates with biological science degrees, ex-teachers, ex-poets, ex-cowboys. The sons of traditional farmers, the daughters of migrant farm workers, the accidental agriculturalists and the deliberate career switchers all mark our maps. In foothills, warehouses, back valleys, and vacant lots they are popping up as we reclaim human spaces in the broad lazerland of monoculture that has engulfed rural America.
http://civileats.com/2009/06/12/greenhorns-building-a-movement-of-young-farmers/
“In Transition” preview
June 12, 2009
“Age-old wisdom for the new economy”
June 12, 2009
Sarah: When you look ahead at the coming months, perhaps years, of economic downturn, what do you see coming, and what does indigenous experience teach us about what we should be doing?
Rebecca: I’ve gotta say, it’s about time the bubbles burst. I don’t want to see anybody without a home or a job, but Wall Street had to come to reality sooner or later. I just wish they were taking the brunt of it instead of Main Street.
President Obama assumes that through more spending we can stimulate the financial sector. But why would we want to save something that had no productivity for human life? Until we move away from that paradigm, I don’t hold out too much optimism for the next months, or the next years, or even the next seven generations.
What indigenous experience tells us is that an economy is about fairness and equity. It should be for the well-being of your people and the sacredness of creation. You take care of your place because it provides for you. And the place provides for you because you’re protecting it. We have to begin to rethink our economic system so that it’s accountable for our place.
Sarah: So what is an economy for?
Rebecca: The economy used to be about livelihoods and the provision of a household, but we’ve lost that purpose. We have created an economic system with a goal of material wealth, rather than human development.
With the need for the public to take swift action, Homer-Dixon admits he’s alarmed by the amount of public apathy especially amongst the youth. “I don’t understand why young people aren’t out there in the thousands on the streets saying, ‘This is our future.’
“I think part of the problem is that a lot of the public doesn’t understand how serious this is,” he continued. “And the real problem? There’s a certain lack of mobilization, there’s a lot of apathy, especially among young people. They’re not getting engaged, they’re not organized into a politically mobilized force.”
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Features/2009/05/29/9620211-ca.html
Window Farms
May 28, 2009
Over the next several years we will have to make do with less oil. The high prices of oil last year are thought to be the peak production of oil. Raymond James a investment firm has put out a report which was wrote about in the Wall Street Journal last week, “Peak oil represents a paradigm shift of historic proportions. Unfortunately, mankind better get ready to live in a peak oil world because we believe the ‘peak’ is now behind us.” When the investment firm that bears the name of the Bucaneer’s Stadium says we are in for a paradigm shift, it gives credit to all those people who have been thinking about peak oil for over a year now since oil prices hit their maximum. If we are looking at a future with more expensive oil rather than cheap oil where do we begin?
We have to take into consideration that our food system is the second leading user of oil in our nation. A nation that resorts to having to import food to survive will not be sustainable for very long. Lets discuss ideas on how to create a food system based upon the sunlight we receive as well as potential alternative energy sources. Lets dream design a suburban agriculture system together. We have a clear and present danger that we can overcome if we put our creative forces together. How we rebuild ourselves out of this recession will impact us for years to come, lets rebuild in a sustainable minded way thinking only of the next generations that must inhabit this world. Let us no longer put the future in debt to live in the present. The money to pay for that oil must come from an economy, lets get this economy rolling and off of oil so we can save our money for more important things such as investments into our future as well as rehealing the planet from the damage we have caused collectively. We could put millions of people to work, end hunger, provide people with lives worth living all with just a simple choice to go in that direction instead of having it be forced upon us.
http://www.codegreencommunity.org/profiles/blogs/transitioning-our-food-system
“Thomas Berry: Living in harmony with nature”
April 28, 2009
Imagine an America where the trees in your backyard have legal rights, urban dwellers travel mostly by foot or bicycle, and people meet for religious worship outdoors as often as indoors.
Imagine a world with no landfills, a world with “living” buildings and food gardens on every neighborhood block.
That, in a small way, helps illustrate Berry’s “Ecozoic Era.”
Berry wrote in his seminal 1999 book “The Great Work” that humans must conceive new politics, economics, religious teachings and ways of educating:
“Our own special role, which we will hand on to our children, is that of managing the arduous transition from the terminal Cenozoic to the emerging Ecozoic Era, the period when humans will be present to the planet as participating members of the comprehensive Earth community.”
“The End Is Near! (Yay!)”
April 21, 2009
…Transition’s approach is adamantly different from that of the survivalists I heard about, scattered in the mountains around Sandpoint in bunkers stocked with gold and guns. The movement may begin from a similarly dystopian idea: that cheap oil has recklessly vaulted humanity to a peak of production and consumption, and no combination of alternative technologies can generate enough energy, or be installed fast enough, to keep us at that height before the oil is gone. (Transition dismisses Al Gore types as “techno-optimists.”) But Transition then takes an almost utopian turn. Hopkins insists that if an entire community faces this stark challenge together, it might be able to design an “elegant descent” from that peak. We can consciously plot a path into a lower-energy life — a life of walkable villages, local food and artisans and greater intimacy with the natural world — which, on balance, could actually be richer and more enjoyable than what we have now. Transition, Hopkins has written, meets our era’s threats with a spirit of “elation, rather than the guilt, anger and horror” behind most environmental activism. “Change is inevitable,” he told me, “but this is a change that could be fantastic.”
…Brownlee spelled out some probable outcomes, quoting peak oil’s pantheon of thinkers: Oil hits $300 a barrel by 2013. Middle Eastern exports cease. Things we take for granted — supermarkets, suburbs — quickly become impossible, and the world sinks into an “unprecedented economic crisis” that will “topple governments, alter national boundaries,” incite wars and “challenge the continuation of civilized life.” Brownlee paused after reading that last quote. He hadn’t even gotten to climate change and the implosion of the American dollar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19town-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4&ref=magazine
“Exploring Permaculture in the Big City”
April 13, 2009
When asked about pest control, Read said the options start at doing nothing, and advance to removing or relocating the pests or introducing things that eat them. If it gets to the point where he has to employ even a pesticide approved for use in organic production, he said, “I know there is something wrong with my design.” Incorporating more balance and diversity into a garden design by leaving part of it wild serves a practical as well as philosophical purpose by increasing the likelihood that the area will naturally to attract birds or other insects that will eat the pests.
Everything in a permaculture project should ideally contribute to the larger whole. Recapping an earlier discussion about lawns, one participant said, “Grass doesn’t have to be wasted space–get a sheep!” Because who would want a boring green patch when you could have a bounty of cheese instead?
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/04/exploring-permaculture-in-big-city.php?dcitc=weekly_nl
