"Local" has become a buzzword. Today there’s eco-localism, local food and local farming, local media movements, as well as regional, state, and even national ad campaigns urging us to “eat local" and "buy local.” Local's gone global, but what exactly does the term mean anymore? David Levine, of the American Sustainable Business Council, discusses the “triple bottom line” … [Read more...]
A two-century fight for the small, the local and the beautiful
Twentieth-century America witnessed the blossoming of Agrarianism as an intellectual and cultural movement. Its roots lay within the mythos of the early American Republic, which cast the self-sufficient yeoman farm family as the foundation of ordered liberty. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1785: Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, … [Read more...]
Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow and the loving community
What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody...It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointed in its members, always trying to contain its divisions and … [Read more...]
Why the world needs Transition
There are many approaches to the three main crises threatening civilization today, namely, climate change, peak oil and economic crisis. The problem is that most of them won't work. Weak and cowardly Most responses to these huge problems are too little, too late. For example, even though stimulus (spend more) and austerity (make big cuts) take opposite approaches to fixing … [Read more...]
Wendell Berry: Forget about big solutions to ecological emergency
"We don’t have a right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not," Wendell Berry told Bill Moyers in a rare TV interview aired earlier this month. "The only question we have a right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?" It's easy to get discouraged once you recognize the threat that climate change … [Read more...]