Editor's Picks

For millions of rural women and their families in developing countries, rights to agricultural land and forest resources are critical determinants of their well-being and their security against destitution. Not only can such property rights enhance individual welfare, they can also strengthen livelihoods for the most vulnerable and help conserve forests that are of global importance as carbon sinks and sources of biodiversity.

People of conscience face two crucial challenges today: (1) Telling the truth about the dire state of the ecosphere that makes our lives possible, no matter how grim that reality, and (2) remaining committed to collective action to create a more just and sustainable world, no matter how daunting that task. Ellen LaConte’s new book, Life Rules, is a welcome addition to the growing literature on these crises. It offers an unflinching assessment of the problems and an honest path to sensible action. In an interview, I asked her to elaborate on her background and path to the insights of the book.

You learn extraordinary things living among the poor. The first thing you learn [from people] in poverty is that there is an enormous creativity. You cannot be an idiot if you want to survive.

This is a peak oil story. Or maybe a story about what happens when peak oil activism collides with peak oil itself. It is a tale about that punch in the stomach announcement that reality has arrived.

Food justice is about ensuring access to healthy, quality food for all people, no matter their economic position. Ahmadi and Reverend Jeffrey sat down with YES! to explain how a total reorientation of the food system can support community health and wealth—planting local businesses, creating jobs, and growing a public understanding about why our current paradigm fails us all, especially those in the most need.

When big-thinkers at companies with the most skin in the energy game are behind closed doors and they discuss how the world really looks going forward, do they say that there are bumps in the road but that things will be fine, just fine, as they suggest publicly? Three years ago, we got a glimpse into the room when Royal Dutch/Shell issued a scenario forecasting the world in 2020. Based on current economic and energy-use patterns around the world, Shell said that energy supplies will be so tight that they will tip the world into a full-blown crisis in which governments will force their populations to reduce driving, use less electricity, and pay an extremely steep increase for what they do consume. Today, Shell returned with an update. If the world does not change how it uses energy, its scenario will hold true.

Prior to Ostrom, many economists believed the commons could be solved only through privatization or top-down state control. In her 1990 book Governing the Commons, Ostrom found examples of a third way: self-organized enterprises — groups of fishers, farmers, or ranchers — who voluntarily organized themselves in order to share the short-term sacrifices and reap the long-term rewards of their sustainable stewardship of common resources.

Our desire not to stand on the wrong side of history is radically tempered by our desire to keep the flow of oil coming and the markets stable. The US cannot endure another major economic shock, and oil price spikes and the possible market repercussions of a destabilizing Middle East clearly terrify our present administration.

The advantages of aerial cargo ropeways are so numerous that it is no surprise that they are - slowly - being rediscovered. Worries about global warming, peak oil and environmental degradation have made the technology even more appealling. This does not only concern energy use: contrary to a road or a railroad track, a cargo ropeway can be built straight through nature without harming animal and plant life (or, potentially, straight through a city without harming human life). Traffic congestion also plays into the hands of cableways, because the service is entirely free from interference with surface traffic.

I believe in eating local, nutritious foods. It is relatively easy to do this with vegetables, eggs and dairy products but buying bread that I feel good about is much more challenging. This past summer, during the Our Daily Bread Course, I learned more about why buying local healthy bread is very difficult because bread is a highly processed product by its very nature.

This is the essence of the frontier economy and the culture of monotony. It exists wherever a landscape is reduced from native ecological complexity to the artificial simplicity of commodity monoculture. In short, the frontier economy and the culture of monotony replace the native intelligence embodied in these intact ecologies with the ignorance of the idiot.

Right here in the desert southwest, in fact, one of the last great "common pool resource" systems in North America provides irrigation water and open grazing land to farmers and pastoralists. Derived from the imported culture of Spanish settlers (via the Arabic Moors who brought the concept to Iberia previously) and combined with the best practices of the native peoples of the region, the acequia system is a powerful example of how we might envision people working together not only with each other but with the land itself.

People have said it to me directly over the years, in person and in email.  It’s impossible.  How can you even think about Transition in Los Angeles?  It’s too big. Within Transition circles we counsel each other to “start where you are.”  Well, where I am is in the middle of Los Angeles, the eleventh largest metropolitan area in the world, 10 to 12 million people.  This is my home town.  This is where we started.

Interview with the Canadian physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté: "The normal basis for child development has always been the clan, the tribe, the community, the neighborhood, the extended family. Essentially, post-industrial capitalism has completely destroyed those conditions. People no longer live in communities which are still connected to one another.