I taught college logic for decades. Logical fallacies make me squirm. However, most people have errant ideas about logic. My undergraduate students always get huffy and insist that their "true premise" is logical. Logic examines process, prior to truth. A true conclusion can be arrived at if, and only if, the premises are true, and the process by which the argument is … [Read more...]
Bugging out from Boston to Vermont
My wife Sarah and I are moving to Vermont. I’ve been studying climate change and its interconnected problems for a year, and my research has brought me to the conclusion that a time of tremendous scarcity and uncertainty is upon us. So we've decided that it’s time to get started building a different, more resilient kind of life. When I first began understanding the … [Read more...]
Farewell to empire
For one of America's smallest states, Vermont has a lot to teach the rest of the country about living locally. It's always had the local democracy of the New England town meeting. Now Vermont is getting attention for a thriving local food economy of small farms, great farmers markets and food entrepreneurs exporting everything from organic seeds to local tofu. And in the … [Read more...]
Building a resilient homestead of your own
“Imagine inheriting a food forest,” farmer and author Ben Falk suggests in The Resilient Farm and Homestead: an Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach. And although Falk does eventually go on to describe exactly how one would go about creating a low-maintenance, edible forest garden, the idea he poses ignites a greater question – what does it mean to leave … [Read more...]
Transition: a yuppie substitute for activism?
The exchange below took place between DM, an anti-nuclear activist in Vermont, and Steve Chase, a professor at Antioch University in Keene, NH and co-founder of a local Transition Group. We've published an excerpt from Steve's response. Is Transition US just a sort of yuppie substitute for taking serious political action on, say, the Yankee G.E. nuke plant in Vernon, VT and … [Read more...]