Solutions

- Portland, the US capital of alternative cool
- Are electric or hybrid cars a green marketing myth, or a real solution?
- Is This the Most Beautiful Street in the World?
- Voices from the previews of ‘In Transition 2.0′ (video)
- When the Transition Movement & the Community Rights Movement Start Collaborating, Watch Out!

Outrageous, snarky, “madly engaging,” bileful—these are a few of the terms that have been used to describe author and social critic James Howard Kunstler. But he’s actually a great deal more than these things, as anyone who's really come to know him, even if only through his books and Internet postings, can tell you. His most personal writings reveal a human, vulnerable, wonderfully versatile, cheerful side that few people know exists.

For nearly four decades, industrial hemp advocates have extolled the virtues of hemp (cannabis sativa, variety sativa), a plant whose cultivation is still banned in the US, thanks to its scandalous distant cousin, cannabis sativa, variety indica. The latter is the source of the illicit drug marijuana. The former produces good quality fiber and has a tetrahydrocannabinol (THC – the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana) concentration of 1% or less. The latter produces negligible usable fiber and has a THC concentration of 4-20%.

So why can't we legalise hemp in America?

Americans live in a country in which bigger is often supposed to be better. Perhaps this is why our homes, like our food portions, waistlines, and debt, continue to expand...But the rise of the McMansion--and its attendant conspicuous consumption--has also helped to create the burgeoning tiny house movement, which extols the virtues of living smaller. Like Henry David Thoreau, who built his own 150 square-foot cabin on Walden Pond in the 1840s, most tiny house aficionados cite the sheer satisfaction of paring down to the basics, choosing, as he put it, "to front only the essential facts of life."

Korean artist Jihyun Ryou, a graduate of the Dutch Design Academy Eindhoven, translates traditional knowledge on food storage into contemporary design. She found the inspiration for her wall-mounted storage units while listening to the advice of her grandmother, a former apple grower, and other elderly. Her mission: storing food outside the refrigerator.

Some nineteen months ago, this blog launched what I thought would be a relatively straightforward survey of the role of myth, narrative and the nonrational in shaping the peak oil debate. After a flurry of unexpected detours into Seventies appropriate tech, the end of the Space Age, and the theory of magic, just for starters, that survey has finally reached as much closure as it's going to find. A glance back over the terrain just surveyed is in order, and a few loose ends need to be tied up, before proceeding to the next major theme I want to examine -- the twilight of America's empire and the implications of that massive geopolitical fact for the world.

Wendell Berry’s powerful book was the first stepping stone in the path that eventually brought me to the Transition Movement. It spoke of the places I visited almost every day, and the book itself had provided protection to those places against development.

It was powerful to me then because it spoke to my loneliness and feelings of failure in society. And it’s powerful to me now because it offers a scathing criticism of the things I’ve come to criticize myself.

The word "carpooling" usually conjures images from the 1970s: service stations warning "No Gas", lines at the pump, and bell-bottom pants. For many people, carpooling brings to mind quaint notions of penny-pinching habits that went out of style along with turning the thermostat down.

But the history of carpooling goes back almost as far as the invention of the automobile itself, and has endured well-beyond its heyday in the late 70s, according to a publication by MIT's Rideshare Research.

Nearly 40% of the global population currently lives within 50 km of a coast, and many of these people depend on the productivity of the sea. Inadequate fisheries management and widespread overuse of marine and coastal resources are eroding the traditional basis of life for millions of people. As coastal populations soar, pressure on marine resources has become unsustainable in many places.

Are no-take fishery reserves the answer?

Practitioners of wild farming, also called conservation-based agriculture, seek to reverse industrial agriculture’s devastating effects on wildlife by adopting farming methods that support nature. They envision a landscape where farms meld into the environment and mimic the natural processes that surround them. If wild farming sounds like organic farming, that’s because both are based on a similar vision: that farms should be managed as natural systems. Most wild farmers employ organic practices, like nontoxic pest management, composting, and crop rotation, all of which encourage biodiversity.

If an alien species were to visit our school cafeterias at lunchtime, it might conclude that we don’t value the health and well-being of the most vulnerable members of our society—our developing children. Not only are our youth daily served low-quality processed products, they are inculcated, at a young age, to the factory-farm model at the heart of our worst environmental problems, namely water pollution, soil erosion, global climate change and fossil fuel depletion.

Engaging in the reskilling/skillsharing aspect of transition has revolutionised my whole attitude towards life. As I say, I didn't really notice it at first. It's been cumulative and all-pervasive. Paying attention to my own skills and those of fellows-in-transition, which are dismissed or ignored in the mainstream discourse: the ability to hold a meeting where everyone's included; communicating the experience of downshifting; learning to cook and eat differently; making space so solutions can emerge in the face of energy and financial constraints, using a chainsaw, making a rocket stove at the Transition Camp!

If I am right in saying "the key to resilience in the coming decades will be our ability, in the moment, to imagine ways around the crises we cannot prevent, predict or plan for", then how can we increase the imaginative capacity of our fellow citizens so they/we will be ready, in the moment?

Wellington's CSA offers a new model as a multi-stakeholder cooperative: it is currently the only New Zealand cooperative that exists for the mutual benefit of both consumers and producers. For growers, it seeks to create a return to help grow the farm, provide better farming resources, expand its own coverage, improve distribution mechanisms and promote the health values of producing food in this manner. The consumers appreciate the availability of nutritious healthy food, produced without leeching and destroying the land as modern industrial farming does, as well as the social benefits of working together voluntarily at the tasks involved in running their cooperative.