Help protect our beaches and our climate: So Cal 350 Climate Action is organizing a rally at the Santa Monica Pier on Saturday Feb 3. The rally is to stop offshore drilling. When: Saturday, 3 February 2018 10AM to 12Noon Where: Santa Monica Pier (north – or west – side), Santa Monica, CA 90401 Multiple organizations are participating. See this page for full details.
Why would someone sit down and write a novel? In the case of my new novel, Whatever Comes Next, my answer is: because the message just needed to come out right now. And here’s how it happened …
The shadow side of the Great Mother archetype Bernard Lietaer, in a brilliant 1997 article, describes the repression of the Great Mother archetype: “The Great Mother archetype was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many traditional cultures today. But this archetype has been violently repressed in the West for at least 5,000 years starting with the Indo-European invasions – reinforced by the anti-Goddess view of…
What it won’t be If we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too lateIf we act as individuals, it’ll be too littleBut if we act as communities, it might just be enough,just in time.– Transition movement, Cheerful Disclaimer The Transition movement understands, at an intuitive level, that government cannot fix it. We won’t be seeing large-scale, meaningful, sufficient problem-solving action — on global warming, environmental toxins, peak oil, social justice — from our government agencies, certainly not within…
Thom Hartmann, in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, gives us an idea of the magnitude of change that will be required. He reminds us of the Older Culture view, the tribal culture, of which Native Americans are an example. These cultures held a different notion of the place where humans stand in the order of creation: We are part of the world. It is our destiny to cooperate with the rest of creation. This is what it will take…
Once our “trauma center” is up and running, we can turn to Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles: “Observe and interact.” We must learn how to observe, and what to observe. We must retrain our powers of observation for the new economy — our abilities to observe the right stuff so that the new structure won’t simply copy the old. Some of the ideas brought out in this booklet may seem dramatically different and radical when posed as economic premises – ideas like…
George Bernard Shaw famously said that all progress depends on not being reasonable. It’s time for a large amount of civic unreasonableness. – James Gustave Speth At the beginning of Part III, I quoted David Ehrenfeld. He reminds us that our job is to set up a parallel alternative structure to have in place as a safety net, ready to catch our local community when the conventional system fails. This statement applies to economics, as well. To solve the full…
Economics and social injustice is such a significant issue that it demands its own Practical Tool point. Our society currently has deep economic divides which are worsened by race, culture, geography and prejudice. NEF writes of the Great Redistribution where power, asset ownership, voice, and political clout will have to become more fairly distributed across the populace. If we are to be successful in overcoming current problems, then as we design long-term, viable economic solutions we will have to overcome…
The concept of “social enterprise” has been gathering traction in the U.S. It’s kind of like a hybrid of the business world and the nonprofit world. In its most basic form, there’s the example of a gift store within a museum: the profits from the store fund the social cause of the museum. In more complex forms, there are micro-loan businesses that fund third-world startups, bakeries that employ at-risk workers, and a myriad of creative examples. In the UK, the…
The shift from a growth economy to economic contraction has turned our concepts of “profit” and “income” upside down. The idea of “investment” has similarly been radically altered. In the old paradigm, when we thought about “investments,” it meant turning our money over to some mega-institution for them to “invest” for us. We expected interest or dividend income in return for the use of our money. If you have checked any financial institutions lately, those concepts come from a bygone…