A fully featured human settlement, with independent sources of initiative, in which human activities are integrated into the natural environment in a way that is sustainable into the indefinite future.
“What I’m talking about is Carbon-negative habitat. And eco-villages as vehicles for experimentation: food, buildings, energy, livelihoods that are branded carbon-negative. Let’s go beyond thinking of reducing 20 per cent this or five per cent that. Let’s think about 110, 120, 180 per cent changes in some of the things we do.” Albert Bates
Ecovillages are engaged in the transformation of values in four ways that may make the transition to sustainability easier and more graceful: delinking growth from well-being, reconnecting people with the places where they live, affirming indigenous patterns and practices, and offering a holistic and experiential vessel for social experiments, educational methodologies, and transition paths.
In Activists to Grassroots, Tony discusses how activists need to start working with grassroots and create a new hybrid radical activist-grassroots persona.
Poor people and communities of color are the most impacted by the dramatic ecological crises currently facing our planet.
In April of this year, Movement Generation and the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center convened nearly 30 activists and organizers representing various grassroots and social justice organizations from throughout California to participate in a two-week Liberation Permaculture Design Course.
Liberation Permaculture, a framework and design science that invokes the traditional knowledge of land-based peoples, provides organizers with a methodology to resist systems of oppression through building resiliency in our communities. It is a means to prepare oppressed communities for the oncoming environmental disasters while building the world we want and need now.
Come hear these course participants report back about how they are implementing Liberation Permaculture into their organizing work and how it can provide us with a critical framework for the necessary and just transition from a carbon, consumption, and profit-based economy to the participatory and life-affirming, need-based society we envision for the future.
Stupid people! …for not making Alyosha from the Ukraine the Eurovision 2010 winner with this song. Not only a great song and a great voice, but also a song with a message and a singer/songwriter with a mission: http://www.alyoshamission.com/
The singer ALyosha, who was born on May 14th, 1986, in 2,5 weeks after the Chernobyl disaster, has always believed in the transformative power of music. When politicians fail to deliver on their promises, it is the artists, actors, film-makers and other representatives of the world of show business who can and should use their popularity and talent to promote socially important causes.
Alyosha decided to use her powerful voice of 4 octaves to bring a globally important social cause to the Eurovision platform. She wrote the song Sweet People which appeals to the world community to stop and to look around at those environmental problems which are so often unjustly played down and overlooked by the global powers-that-be.
I do however have some problems with this new localism agenda. As I listened to Blond’s talk, I thought, well is it actually true that we live in a country with not much society, that society has now disassociated? I remember just before the election hearing Eddie Izzard, who had just run all around the country, doing 50-something marathons for charity. He said he didn’t believe in ‘Broken Britain’.. everywhere he had gone people were much more community focused than he had expected. My experience from visiting Transition initiatives is that community is there, everywhere, sometimes more obvious than other places, but the point is that community will organise when it wants to, it doesn’t need permission from government.
In the short film at the top of this post, Cameron says “I don’t believe that civil society springs up of its own accord”. Well there are thousands of community organisations around the country, run mostly by volunteers, Transition initiatives, Low Carbon Communities, Greening groups and so on, none of them waited for permission from government. They certainly sprang up of their own accord. What matters is for the State to offer such projects meaningful support, and to remove the obstacles strewn in their paths.
Of course the cynic might point out that the reason for the Big Society is the sweeping cuts in public spending that are only just beginning. If you replace the word ‘localism’ with ‘privatisation’, it is not that different in some ways from the Thatcher government’s agenda. There is a challenge within it around what people are actually capable of doing in their spare time. Working full time, and also running a school? Working, managing a family, looking after an ailing relative, and running a Community Land Trust? Of course there are incredible people out there who do that, but it will have its limits unless people are supported in other ways too.
Keynotes Hollywood star and environmentalist Daryl Hannah, Major General Michael Jeffery, former Governor General of Australia, father of permaculture Bill Mollison, Costa of SBS TV’s Costa’s Gardening Odyssey, Mexican sustainability entrepreneur Eugenio Gras, Petra Schneider of IDEP Foundation and many others.
Daryl Hannah and Paul Watson, behind the Sea Shepard ship Steve Irwin
Our chance to get together to discuss Permaculture in depth, improve our skills, share our expertise and explore new interests with like minded peers. We will also discuss issues concerning Permaculture training and the networking required for the movement to maximize its influence and involve Permaculture in initiating powerful change in Australia. By the end of the conference we will have the backbone of a document – a resource for us all to help us manage change.
Our discussions will be more detailed and in depth and will assume you are familiar with the basic principles of Permaculture. This 2 day segment of our 4 day event is aimed at members of the Permaculture community, usually people with a completed Permaculture Design Course(PDC) or recognised equivalent.
As a video blogging (vlogging) pioneer, Daryl created the sustainable living video blog, and website dhlovelife. www.dhlovelife.com deals with sustainable solutions and features weekly five-minute inspirational video blogs, daily news updates, alerts, community and access to goods and services. Dhlovelife.com has a large avid consistent group of viewers and unique visitors.
Daryl Hannah has been passionate and committed to practicing a low impact lifestyle for over 20 years. From her small footprint, passive and active solar home complete with grey water systems and organic garden, to being an early adaptor of biofuels, Daryl Hannah has been actively spreading the good news of how well it all works and how good it all feels.
Among some of her most memorable films, many have become classics such as Blade Runner, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Splash, Roxanne, Steel Magnolias, Wall Street, Grumpy Old Men 1 and 2, as well as the Kill Bill series Vol 1 and 2.
Daryl has worked with Woody Allen, Neil Jordan, Fred Schepisi, Oliver Stone, Robert Altman and John Sayles to name a few. Her first strong impression on audiences came when she was cast as the acrobatic android, Pris in Ridley Scott’s science fiction classic Blade Runner.
Alemany Farm is a 4 acre, fully functioning urban farm nestled between a major highway intersection, a newly gentrified neighborhood on a hill and a housing project- the perfect place to grow some food! We got a tour (and some amazing fruit) from Antonio Roman-Alcalá, Volunteer Coordinator and soon to be videoblogger/documentarian extraordinaire. The work being done at Alemany Farm proves the point that urban farming and local food production is totally possible and necessary for the health and well being of a city and its inhabitants. Local farming and gardening are great motivators for people to get acquainted, eat more healthily and become more connected with where their food comes from and what it actually is (olives grow on trees? broccoli is a flower?). If you live in the SF Bay area, you can visit or volunteer at Alemany Farm on the weekends- check out AlemanyFarm.org.
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