Women

The nuns provide a model for all who are exploring ways in which humanity can reconstitute itself and forge a post-industrial culture that radically departs from the paradigm of industrial civilization. Members of Sisters Of The Earth are deeply involved not only with social justice issues, but with local organic food efforts, permaculture, the Transition movment, raising awareness on climate change, economic justice, and sustainable living.

The documentary takes a penetrating look at overpopulation, what fuels it and why the world has become complacent about the issue after making a good start in addressing it during the late 60s. The film dispels some key myths about overpopulation – chief among them the belief that it's long been solved – even if it stops short of admitting the inevitability of a world population crash as the Earth's resources deplete. And it conveys its message in an engaging, visually immersive style that finds just the right balance between hard facts and ordinary human involvement.

All of us will need to work cooperatively to become more self-sufficient as we restructure of our culture post fossil fuels, which requires more time at home, making the juggling all the harder if we refuse to give something up. And women are not good at giving things up, as evidenced by our current quandary of too many roles to play.

Ultimately I'm not convinced you can have any kind of functional relationship with consumer culture -- even though, of course, I have one. I live in large measure off the waste of industrial society, a waste that will probably dry up some day.

Grace Lee Boggs, a legendary figure in the struggle for justice in America, shrewdly assesses the current crisis—political, economical, and environmental—and shows how to create the radical social change we need to confront new realities. A vibrant, inspirational force, Boggs has participated in all of the twentieth century’s major social movements—for civil rights, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and more. She draws from seven decades of activist experience, and a rigorous commitment to critical thinking, to redefine “revolution” for our times. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is 95 years old.
[Her ideas sound remarkably like Transition and similar movements.]

- Albert Bates: Slavery 2.0
- Carolyn Baker: Masculine, Feminine, Collapse, And The Next Culture
- Andrew Nikiforuk: You and Your Slaves
- Ivan Illich: Energy and Equity

- World Naked Bike Ride – in pictures
- Not a Fairytale: America's First Public Food Forest
- Sharon Astyk's resolutions upon reaching middle age
- Interview with Eva Schonveld - Transition in Scotland.

If you are invisible as a producer in the GDP, you are invisible in the distribution of benefits in the economic framework of  the national budget. As feminists we must embrace an ecological model if we are to transform economic power, and the market and commodification must be seen as the servants of such an approach.

The argument is being made that “food sovereignty” is an organising principle so demonstrably strong that it has the potential to transform economic power. Can we really invest in it as the ecological principle to take us into the 21st century?

Since its beginnings, the sleeper-awakes scenario has been one of the most commonly used frameworks for introducing fictional utopias and dystopias–yet somehow it doesn't feel overdone. The reason, I suspect, is that the sleep is incidental to the story, the true focus being the new world order and how it compares with the old. That's certainly the case with Patricia Frank's Falling Through Time, the story of a woman who travels into the future and takes us on a sort of guided tour of it. Her name is Summer Holbrook, and she's a prominent advertising executive who goes missing while vacationing in Alaska. After suffering a spill down a glacier crevasse, she freezes, falls into suspended animation and is found and rescued by a band of expeditioners in the year 2084.

Philosopher, author and lifelong activist Grace Lee Boggs encouraged...women to re-imagine education, work and the things they do to care for each other and their families.

“All over the planet more and more people are thinking beyond making a living to making a life, a life that respects Earth and one another,” she said. “This is the next American revolution.”

In the countries of the Global South, women are the primary producers of food, the ones in charge of working the earth, maintaining seed stores, harvesting fruit, obtaining water and safeguarding the harvest. Between 60 to 80% of food production in the Global South is done by women (50% worldwide) (FAO, 1996). Women are the primary producers of basic grains such as rice, wheat, and corn which feed the most impoverished populations in the South. Despite their key role in agriculture and food however, women; together with their children; are the ones most affected by hunger.

We have used language to write women out of agriculture - out of its history, out of its present, engaging in the "housewifization" of real agricultural work. The implication that the farmer's wife is not a farmer, and is thus knowledgeable about only kitchens and babies (as important as those things are) is a diminuation, an act of linguistic violence that erases the multiple competences of farm women, partnered or not.

There’s room in the movement for everyone who cares, whether their bent is for deadly serious de-industrialization, “fun and sexy” protests, technological innovation, or even, yes, going out walking.

Don't stand there asking what to do! Look around, roll up your sleeves and get busy! Offer your talents to the task. If you can write, start writing and share your thoughts with ever wider circles of readers. If you can farm, start an organic CSA. If you are an engineer, you should be focusing on renewable energy.