Articles in "The Road to Resilience"

Recently, on the Facebook site, Future Water Vashon, Michael Laurie, local home energy consultant and green systems proponent, posted an account of his visit to the building inspector at the King County Department of Public Health to discuss the legality of compost toilet/graywater systems for onsite sewage disposal.

This last Friday, I watched in utter amaDuring the 2008 presidential election, Obama spoke with a man on the street, later to be known as “Joe the Plumber.“ Joe asked Obama how his tax plan would he, as a small businessman, would be affected.

There are two important initiatives out there right now that you should know about.  Many of you have signed one or both, but I will try to explain them for those that need more information. The more straightforward one is I 735, which is intended to overturn the Supreme Court “Citizen’s United” decision. 

I just finished reading The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlsen.  I highly recommend this book.  Don’t be put off by the schlocky title; it is a well-researched and incisive report on the state of knowledge about soil.  It shows that much of the carbon now in the atmosphere could be locked up in healthy soil.  However, it is the nature of healthy soil that was most enlightening for me.

In recent years, I’ve really gotten tired of the common use of simplistic labels that cause us to bypass our critical faculties to accept judgements about matters that our leaders and pundits would rather not look into too closely.

A friend of mine recently said, “If you are born on this planet, you are an owner.”  It seems that a lot of the problems we have, especially today, revolve around who owns what.    It has always seemed ridiculous to me that a person born into our country does not have an unalienable right to stand in one place, much less claim the space to build a shelter and grow or forage for some food.

Here is good news! Most of the above named article by Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu with the permission of the website, Project Syndicate is reprinted here:

My main concern in the Road to Resilience is how we approach and prepare for what many see as a major civilizational paradigm shift.  What is forcing the shift is the arrival of natural limits to the further development of the existing political, economic, and social institutions we rely on today.  At the base of it is a profligate use of resources and poor housekeeping.

This week, I’d like to further discuss the basic premise of Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything.  The “this” she is referring to is human-caused climate change.  Up until now, the general consensus has been that taking environmental factors more seriously in making our economic decisions is all that is required to mitigate this crisis.

Inherent in the recognition and celebration of the darkest time of the year is the return of the light.  Our confidence in the promise of the winter solstice is reflected in the birth of Christ, the miraculous Hannukah light that carried us through the dark time, the reinforcing of community ties of Kwanzaa, and personal resolve to reinvent ourselves in our New Year’s resolutions.

This article finds us a day or two after the mid term election.  For the last 8 months, we have been besieged by  non-stop daily emails (“All is lost!”, “No Hope!”, “Triple Match!”) desperately pleading for donations.  We knew it was coming after the Supreme Court decision in favor of faux grass roots group Citizens United.