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AMY GOODMAN: While President Obama is reporting looking into tapping a former corporate executive to become his next top economic adviser, many economists question the path the United States is on. Last week, during our trip to Bonn, Germany, I had a chance to speak with the acclaimed Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef. He won the Right Livelihood Award in 1983, two years after the publication of his book Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics. I began by asking him to explain what barefoot economics is.

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: Well, it’s a metaphor, but a metaphor that originated in a concrete experience. I worked for about ten years of my life in areas of extreme poverty in the Sierras, in the jungle, in urban areas in different parts of Latin America. And at the beginning of that period, I was one day in an Indian village in the Sierra in Peru. It was an ugly day. It had been raining all the time. And I was standing in the slum. And across me, another guy also standing in the mud — not in the slum, in the mud. And, well, we looked at each other, and this was a short guy, thin, hungry, jobless, five kids, a wife and a grandmother. And I was the fine economist from Berkeley, teaching in Berkeley, having taught in Berkeley and so on. And we were looking at each other, and then suddenly I realized that I had nothing coherent to say to that man in those circumstances, that my whole language as an economist, you know, was absolutely useless. Should I tell him that he should be happy because the GDP had grown five percent or something? Everything was absurd.

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Web applications usually come with storage attached to it, users can not choose where their data is stored. Put plainly: You get their app, they get your data. We want to improve the web infrastructure by separating web application logic from per-user data storage: Users should be able to use web services they love but keep their life stored in one place they control — a »home folder« for the web. At the same time, application developers shouldn’t need to bother about providing data storage. We also believe that freedom on the web is not achieved by freely licensed web applications running on servers you can’t control. That’s why applications should be pure Javascript which runs client-side, all in the browser. It doesn’t matter if free or proprietary — everything can be inspected and verified. Technically speaking, we define a protocol stack called remoteStorage. A combination of WebFinger for discovery, either BrowserID or OAuth for authorization, CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) for cross-domain AJAX calls and GET, PUT, DELETE for synchronization. We also work on its adoption through patching apps and storage providers.

http://unhosted.org/

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Supporters of geoengineering have proposed radical ways to alter the planet to decrease the level of greenhouse gas emissions. Proposals include creating artificial volcanoes to pollute the atmosphere with sulfur particles, fertilizing the oceans and placing sun-deflecting aluminum foil in the sky. But opposition is growing to geoengineering. We host a debate between Indian environmentalist, scientist, philosopher and eco-feminist, Vandana Shiva, and geopolitical analyst and columnist, Gwynne Dyer. [includes rush transcript]

Source: Democracy Now

The White House honors five young leaders as Champions of Change for outstanding leadership on their college campuses, chosen by the public for their projects that embody the President’s goal to win the future. March 15, 2012. Source: Umass Permaculture.com

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Physicist, food activist and thinker Vandana Shiva visits and discusses her program that promotes local and ecological food models – Navdanya.

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Press Conference from 2011 AGU Fall Meeting – Tue. 11 a.m. PST

Even if we are able to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, Earth could likely see drastic and rapid climate change this century, new research by NASA’s Jim Hansen suggests. Paleoclimate data paints a different picture than models about the sensitivity of the climate system. Detailed analysis of the Earth’s paleoclimate history of recent interglacial periods reveals we are less than a degree Celsius away from equaling a time when sea level was several meters higher than it is today.

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Participants:

James Hansen
Director, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York, USA;
Ken Caldeira
Senior Scientist, Department of Global Ecology Carnegie Institute of Washington, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA;
Eelco Rohling
Professor of Ocean and Climate Change, Southampton University, Southampton, United Kingdom.

MORE: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha05510d.html

Author Gar Alperovitz is a Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the Univ. of Maryland, a Founding Principal of The Democracy Collaborative. More at Capital Institute and Community Wealth

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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.

Filmed by Patrick O’Conner of Oaklandsol.org for permaculture.coop

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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.

Presentations will be provided by individuals representing Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project, Urban Tilth, Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, Ella Baker Center, Catalyst Project, People Organized to Win Employment Rights, Communities for a Better Environment and others.

Source: Oakland Local

A new method of planting rice in Bali is protecting indigenous seed stocks, traditions and livelihoods, thanks to a local organization’s commitment to sharing knowledge and skills in sustainable permaculture practices.

http://www.vimeo.com/3727146

The System of Rice Intensification (SRI), developed originally in Madagascar, is a method of cultivating rice that can double the yield of conventional rice harvests, while requiring 90% less seed, 80% less water, and no chemical inputs. The impacts of this new method are far-reaching, offering more income for farmers and their families, as well as a healthier environment for future generations. The Paradigm Shift Project has documented these impacts and the needs of the local community for more training workshops on the SRI method, led by local Balinese organization Tri Hita Karana Bal

The TeleGarden was an art installation that allows web users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. Members can plant, water, and monitor the progress of seedlings via the tender movements of an industrial robot arm.

Ken Goldberg

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More: Networked Robotics

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