Author: Resilience.org

While being keenly aware of the importance of CDFIs, I had only the barest inkling of their origins, and so I was thrilled to recently have the opportunity to read Clifford N. Rothensal’s newly published Democratizing Finance: Origins of the Community Development Finance Movement.

Usually a recurring event, food swaps allow direct trades to take place between attendees — for instance, a loaf of bread for a jar of preserves or a half-dozen backyard eggs. Your special kitchen concoctions become your own personal currency, allowing you to diversify your pantry while getting to know members of your local food … Continue reading “The Resurgence of Local Food Swap Events”

For a council to have called a ‘climate emergency’, commonly advanced guidelines say that they must have: used these specific words in a motion or executive decision; they must set a target date to reduce their local climate impacts consistent with the IPCC report; they must set up a working group to report within a short … Continue reading “What would a Climate Emergency Plan Look Like?”

The promise of conservation agriculture to bring life back to the land and support biodiversity both above and belowground should appeal to environmentalists and farmers alike. For like it or not, a large part of nature will be what lives on farms, because we now use more than a third of the world’s ice-free land … Continue reading “Growing a Revolution: Excerpt”

The population covered by local governments that have declared a climate emergency now approaches 50 million citizens in 8 countries – and this movement of movements is growing.

All across the country, activists in liberal cities are pushing for zoning reform to allow for more density. Many American cities are booming — Seattle’s population is up 20 percent since 2010 — and to accommodate that growth, they can either build up or out.

That Route 66 road trip is one of erasure, one that conceals the Indigenous history of this land with the expanding White capitalism of early Americana.

The push by corporate America and some large environmental organizations to support some form of a national carbon tax should be followed closely. I expect the battles between progressives and moderates will burn red hot before it’s all over.

The practice involves loading cylinders filled with compressed natural gas (CNG) onto specially designed trucks and hauling the gas between existing pipelines or to areas not connected to a natural gas distribution system, such as rural towns, and remote factories, universities and hospitals.

To get back to Thunberg: while I would say it’s highly likely that some of her success comes from her connections, some of it may well be down to her own skills, and some may also be down to fortunate timing. 

Tune in as Jill Buck of Go Green Radio talks with Dr. Bradford about his report and an upcoming event designed to identify and discuss key leverage points where individuals and communities can most effectively shift our food system towards long-term sustainability through greater energy efficiency and localization.

There are two primary methods for measuring inequality – relative and absolute. In the discipline of economics, the former has become dominant by far.

It’s time to admit defeat and retreat to higher ground.  The consequences of waiting too long to address rising greenhouse gases are now unfolding and the pace is increasing.  This is the reality that is already here.

Alberta’s major exports these days seem to be piles of misinformation, denial, blame, and propaganda on the state-owned Trans Mountain pipeline.

Want to better your community but don’t know where to start? Enter It’s the Little Things: a weekly Strong Towns podcast that gives you the wisdom and encouragement you need to take the small yet powerful actions that can make your city or town stronger.

In a matter of months, the language of climate emergency has exploded into public space in a spectacular way, with national, regional and governments adopting the term.

“It’s what a farm should be doing, feeding local people surrounding the farm,” says Gerald, “if every farmer did that, we wouldn’t need supermarkets. It’s therapy for the farmer and for the community.”

I will therefore take up Kallis’ (2019) conclusion and ask: ‘What about degrowth and a Green New Deal? The opponent is formidable and what we need are alliances, not divisions’.

When we recognize that disaffection, anxiety and stress are not just our own fault but are connected to structural causes, mindfulness becomes fuel for igniting resistance.

If you’re already toting a canvas bag or your home is running on renewables, you need to do more. And if you’re brand new to the world of conservation, welcome to the fight.

Although basically a “clipping service,” I’ve taken Climate Politics/Capitol Light a step further by introducing a sentence or two into each of the write-ups about why I think the actions reported on are important and where they might fit in the political scheme of things. 

Gracefully bringing together all the elements of locally grown, milled, and made organic fabric, Lydia Wendt’s work takes shape with California Cloth Foundry: textiles and apparel in collaboration with nature.

Helium makes for fun at parties with balloons that float around the room. But a growing shortage is becoming deadly serious for those who need helium for critical applications. And, the shortage suggests that other rare, but critical materials needed for our modern infrastructure might not be so easy to replace.

I frequently encounter a notion, among those drawn to cooperatives, that a cooperative should be an amorphous, faceless collective in which old-world skills and norms of leadership can be discarded.

Recently, cities have been rethinking their hard alleys. Montreal has an official Ruelle Verte (“Green Alley”) program encompassing more than 250 back routes that have been turned into gardens, play spaces, and neighborhood gathering spots.

With well established markets, enterprises and memberships in a variety of sectors, the time has never been better for the co-op world to fully embrace the digital realm, helping take a wide range of fresh apps and online services to new heights through their investment and support.

Rather than the neoliberal image of the school as business and ‘exam factory’, the image of the common public school is as a public space and public resource, a place of encounter for citizens of all ages where they participate together in projects of environmental, social, cultural, political and economic significance.

Solberg calculates that 75 percent of energy use and costs for heating could be eliminated in commercial, health care and residential buildings through AHR, even in the frosty Midwest.  He points to a new health club in Edina, Minnesota, which is already saving on construction costs and projected to see 50 percent lower operating costs.

As a story teller and pot-stirrer and social innovator I am now on the hunt for what will put the soil and water and regeneration story on everyone’s lips, to have teenagers to grandmothers march for healthy soil, to have policies that transform degraded land into garden landscapes.

I want to propose that we the people agree to change the meaning of the GND acronym to Green New Directions and start to consider seriously the crop of ideas—some old, many new—now being presented by Democratic presidential candidates and Republican and Democratic members of Congress as a starting point to reach a national consensus.

Despite the U.S. fracking industry’s history of “capital destruction,” one of the top investors in the world has bet big that Occidental holds the secret to Permian profits. But perhaps this time really will be different, or perhaps Occidental will follow in the footsteps of Halcón and others who bet it all on the Permian and lost.

I can already see a growing recognition that connection, inclusion, creativity and celebration are the keys to a genuinely better future.

As a parish priest and Christian Climate Action member put it to me, the ecological crisis is also a “spiritual crisis.” Certainly it seems to be a crisis that requires and justifies spiritual responses and resources – a coalition of religion, ritual and rebellion.

Soils are, after all, the structural foundation for any food production system. So when we first undertake an agroecological approach to farming, we are literally building a sustainable food system from the ground up.

A National Imagination Act could have a key role to play in making that a reality. What would you do? How would you enable the imagination to flourish where you live, work, study? What if…

The rapid uptake of electric buses is occurring in cities around the world, with Bloomberg predicting that by 2030, 84% of global municipal bus sales will be electric.

While we recognize the powerful forces of social reproduction that stymie progressive change and make addressing climate change in time highly unlikely, a trajectory for social transformation has begun and we must stand up together to demand change.

So try something new and get uncivilized. Banish plastic words from your vocabulary, just as you might eliminate plastic from your household.

The way forward is to channel popular support for action on climate change into an organised movement. The power of that movement—marshalled to support a left government—is our best shot at doing something meaningful while we still can.

Dobson’s work is an early step toward finding a way to grow food that restores, rather than exhausts, the earth. “We’re not all the way there yet,” he said. “Humanity has yet to discover 98 percent of what’s under our feet.”

In framing the alternatives, I start from the assumption that our primary purpose is actually building the post-capitalist society, and that our engagement or lack of engagement with the state is a secondary course of action whose main purpose is to create a more conducive, less harmful environment in which to do the building.