Wicked Problem, or Wicked People?
The current suite of problems facing humanity will never be solved while the lunatics are in charge of the asylum.
Read moreCategory Archives: Transition
Coping With a Post-Peak Future
So I first learnt about peak oil back in 2005, when The End of Suburbia was shown at an activist skillshare. And while I didn’t go into denial per se, I didn’t really accept it. It was like if anyone had asked me about it, I would’ve said, “yeah peak oil’s really full on, I don’t know what we’re gonna do about that”. But at the same time, it didn’t impact the way I was living my life, or my strategy for changing the world in any way at all. Of course I already knew all about climate change, supposedly wasn’t in denial of that either, yet was still choosing to work on projects that were largely irrelevant to it.
Read moreRenovating Culture: Rise of the New Domesticity
When my mother and grandmother were my age, they knew how to cook, clean, sew and garden, while I grew up on Disney cartoons and microwaved pizza, beheading barbie dolls and pressing complex buttons on a machine. Despite the yuppie conditioning imposed upon gen-Xers and Millennials to equate self-actualisation with technocentric careerism and “having it all”, the pull of re-skilling in the domestic arts has never been more alluring.
Read moreChangemaker profile: Shani Graham
Inspired by Shani Graham’s recent TEDx talk titled Take a street and build a community, Kari McGregor met with the sustainability guru, co-founder of Ecoburbia and spearhead of the Hulbert Street Sustainability Fiesta to get some insight into what it takes to build community.
Read moreWhere Collapse Meets Radical Politics
Getting most people to the point of wanting the paradigm shift that transition toward a resilient and just society represents, is a massive and daunting task. Yet the way to go about it seems relatively straightforward and generally agreed upon by transitioners. It involves raising awareness about the inevitability of collapse, the ways the current system disadvantages people, and the ways a simpler system would benefit people, while at the same time building alternatives that both demonstrate what’s possible, become the basis for our future society, and reach out to help those in need. At the same time, the increasing severity of collapse means that the current system becomes less and less viable, and the alternatives more and more useful to the mainstream of society.
Read moreChanging the Culture of Food: The Open Food Network
One of the Open Food Network’s core values is to be open-source and entirely not-for-profit. This allows communities all over the world to access the Open Food Network software, adjust it for their needs, and use it to aid their own efforts, whether they be in inner London or rural India. While the open-source and not-for-profit character of the Open Food Network is great news for farmers and communities globally, unsurprisingly it doesn’t make the project particularly appealing to venture capitalists!
Read moreTop 10: Community-Building Cheat Sheet
You’d be hard pushed to find anyone who claims they don’t want to be part of a thriving community. So why don’t most of us live in well-connected communities these days? Is community a relic of a bygone era, or is it possible for us all to rekindle that connection?
Read moreAtamai Ecovillage: It’s Just Common-Sense
A newly formed Permaculture Village in New Zealand is providing families a different way of living. At the top of the South Island, which boasts a temperate, Mediterranean climate with the most sunshine of any part of New Zealand, Atamai Village is nestled in a picturesque, hilly valley just ten minutes’ drive from the Tasman Straight and the town of Motueka. But what makes Atamai different is its vision for a different future. “Atamai” means common sense in Maori. The village was formed as an intentional response to pending climate change and energy descent.
Read moreFinancing the Resilient Economy
So we all know the economy is going to the dogs, and I personally think it’s going to be sooner rather than later. Regardless of when or how though, what seems completely clear is that by the time most of us retire, our superannuation (the Australian privatised compulsory pension scheme, which is mostly invested in the stock market) won’t have held the value it has today.
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SHIFT magazine 