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- 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!

On February 6, journalist and activist Chris Hedges wrote a searing article on the Black Bloc. Occupy theorist David Graeber wrote an open letter in reply.

The Black Bloc first appeared in the 80s and has been with demonstrations across the world ever since. The Black Bloc is a tactic, whereby black-clad individuals wearing hoods and masks appear in the midst of a demonstration to trash stores, break windows, etc.

Not involved with Occupy? It's still important. Occupy is a wild card which could break through the stalemate on energy, climate and politics which bedevils the United States. It could also fizzle out. Or it could take a dark direction, as did some of the radical politics in the 1970s.

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.

It is an article of faith that global trade will be an ever-growing presence in the world. Yet this belief rests on shaky foundations. Global trade depends on cheap, long-distance freight transportation. Freight costs will rise with climate change, the end of cheap oil, and policies to mitigate these two challenges.

... In addition to the corporate response, there is a second, more local, noncorporate response. This response is found in the Relocalization and Transition Towns movements now springing up in many developed countries. It is a bottom-up response that includes individuals and municipalities planning for a post-peak-oil future and altering their way of life.

There is a realization that it is no longer enough to denounce globalization or rail against capitalism. Realistic alternatives must be set forth. For many, it would appear that the commons can provide a useful framework and vocabulary for starting a very different conversation – one that at once addresses politics, economics, culture and our individual aspirations and energies.

Even if we buy certified organic or fair trade marked products it is still very hard to avoid long and large retail chains which contribute to the pressure to industrialise and exploit human and non-human alike somewhere along the line.

How can we combine local, fair or ethical, and organic together in a way that at least has half a chance of caring more for human and non-human alike?

Connecting food to the local economy can provide more people with greater access to local foods.

Making it happen is another story since the necessary infrastructure was gradually dismantled over the past 70 years in favor of a national/global food system that promises low prices, year-round accessibility of products and convenience.

‘The Impact of Community Supported Agriculture’– has found that CSA schemes are providing multiple benefits to thousands of members, their communities, local economies and the environment. CSA offers an innovative approach to reconnecting people with their food, and helps to build strong partnerships between communities and farmers.

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.

How does Transition change your life? Utterly, completely, forever. Because if you embrace what it does, in the way my fellow reporter Jo Homan wrote about so beautifully last week, it will turn your life upside down - like a love affair. It will satisfy you in a way no consumer dream can ever do. It will broaden your intellect, it will engage you with the physical world, the earth and your own body, it will break you out of a tyranny of isolation as Mark wrote on Monday, and all the self-pity and antagonism that goes with that state. It will make you empathic with your fellows, connect you with the spirit of the times. And most of all it will give you back yourself.

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.

-Visions of Urban Agriculture
-San Diego deregulates urban agriculture
-Proposed city amendment provides potential for urban farming
-USDA awards $40 million grants to boost local food supplies