Dare it be said, but, the good news is that with the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather the electrical power grid is destined to be out of action more and more, and for longer and longer durations. The really good blackouts, those bitchin’ two or three day outages that annoy the crap out of the power junkies, will render your workplace totally inoperable.
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It is entirely feasible for the suburbs – where most of us live – to adapt to a low carbon future. Technology is already available to implement a powerdown strategy, involving home retrofitting, local food production and low carbon transport. Permaculture design principles provide a proven template for adapting the suburbs to support a local sharing economy.
These tools are ready. We need to create a catalyst for widespread community action.
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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.
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New Zealand has felt the pinch of economic crisis much as other countries have done, and, with necessity the mother of invention, a small group of enterprising Kiwis have invested time in banking some real solutions.
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Whether our motives are ideological, a matter of necessity, or pure tight-fistedness, we all like getting things for free, right? Well, it just so happens that you can get many of your needs met without spending a single dollar or cent (or yen, or peso, or shekel) on the really free market. Here are ten easily accessible ways of doing just that, and none of them involve begging or stealing!
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So we need to build a new economy, right? And we’re trying, but it’s not happening fast enough, or going deep enough. So here’s a bit of a provocation, a suggested blueprint for one way of doing it. It’s all fairly simple, won’t take much money, and could be transformative if we put all the pieces together.
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A scratch to the surface of our everyday habits reveals a wide range of things we could all be doing better, and it’s not just a matter of switching brands within a ‘green consumer’ paradigm – less is most definitely more where our ecological footprint is concerned. Here are SHIFT’s Top 10 footprint reduction measures we can all implement…
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When you take a really honest look at the track record of technology and innovation, it is sobering. It’s very difficult to get it all right when there are over 7 billion of us doing it. Add to that aspiring to be materially richer year after year, and we have a recipe for large-scale disaster. When you fully consider the track record, betting on innovation to keep the party going is about as rational as investing all your retirement savings on a lottery ticket.
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Unlike many deep green environmentalists however, I’m not so quick to dismiss fashion as completely superficial and irrelevant. Fashion needs to evolve, ideally, to inspire new meanings for aesthetic expression, politicized bodies, and the diversity and enrichment of culture. In a system where commodified self-image is sold as identity, we owe it to ourselves and the planet to truthfully elucidate the stories of those who weave, stitch, embroider, design and shelter the sartorial fabric of history.
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To address our environmental and economic predicaments effectively, self-serving individualism and abdication of responsibility must be supplanted by solidarity. Recognition of, and commitment to, shared responsibilities and interests are the very foundation of a resilient Earth Community.
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