Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In April 2009–just when people thought things couldn’t get worse in San Bernardino County, California—bulldozers demolished four perfectly good new houses and a dozen others still under construction in Victorville, 100 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Detroit was not an accidental choice for the U.S. Social Forum (USSF). Take a look at the decaying Packard Plant or at boarded-up homes and small businesses, and you’d say this city is dying. Less well known is that it is a city in the midst of a rebirth from the bottom up, and the organizers knew this well when they chose Detroit for the second USSF.
Given what a sweeping category sustainability is, author and noted sustainability expert Andrés Edwards is to be commended for distilling it down into two easily digestible volumes for lay readers: The Sustainability Revolution and Thriving Beyond Sustainability.
What struck me during a recent visit to Houston is that efforts to create a downtown with the kind of round the clock activity one sees in other world class cities such as Chicago or New York have so far not succeeded.
Cities in Asia are hubs of production, innovation and wealth, funnelling into themselves immense resources, water, energy, food, drawing in from nearby districts and far-off provinces families and entire communities.
South Asians are seeing more work on the ground and hearing more policy announcements about urban development than ever before. For many who live in and around towns and cities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India (where South Asia’s biggest cities lie) this could be a good thing. The trouble is: national governments and planning authorities in Dhaka, Islamabad and New Delhi are tending more and more to follow a single ideology – economic growth will drive down poverty – and a primary route to that misplaced objective, which is greater urbanisation.
It gives me the greatest pleasure this morning to launch the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan website. The site makes the full version of the UK’s first EDAP freely available, invites comments and discussion, and will act as a dynamic portal for people to discuss the Plan and reshape subsequent revisions.
In this follow-up episode, Host Derek “Deek” Diedricksen gives a tour of his mini-cabin/house built out of recycled junk (from dumpster diving/repurposing) and curbside materials…
-Make Birth Control, Not War
-Resilience and Ruggedness: Why Faster, Bigger and More Complex May Be Better
-Building a Green Economy
-Ill Fares the Land
This set of news reports from around the Asia-Pacific region discuss some persistent matters: the need for food security systems which also protect smallholder farming communities, stemming the tide of migration to towns and cities, recognising and encouraging womens’ participation in business and local administration, reforming land rights so that the marginalised (and particularly women) can use their ownership to advantage.
As Bill Bonner would say, 98% of everything you hear (about housing, retail spending, etc.) is merely noise. Only the underlying trends are important, if you can identify them. I believe we can spot one: It’s The End of Suburbia. I’ll return to this hypothesis at the end of this post.
-Alex Steffen’s Optimistic Environmentalism: The Bright Green City
-Looting Main Street
-Walled In
