If you want to become more self-reliant by growing your own food then this video set may be of great help to you. More details available at www.backyardfoodproduction.com
f you are interested in growing your own food in your backyard, or on a small farm, then welcome to our website. We offer a DVD tutorial that covers the basics of food production systems for a family or small group. Our emphasis is on sustainability, so our orientation is low-tech, with as little ‘store bought’ inputs as possible. We sometimes offer workshops that teach skills related to living sustainably. We are located in Central Texas – the climate and soils (er, lack of) make it very challenging to grow food here. Regardless of where you are, the principles are the same.
Klimaforum09 is your climate summit, the global civil society counterpart of the official UN conference in the Bella Center.
While the UN conference will be a platform for political decision making, Klimaforum09 gathers citizens from all corners of the world to create a socially just and sustainable future.
The idea behind Klimaforum09 is to create an open space, where people, movements and organizations can develop constructive solutions to the climate crisis.
Klimaforum09 is based on the belief that meeting the climate challenge requires more than just new technologies fixes and ‘business as usual’ practices. New ways of thinking, new cultural values, and new ways of organizing society are called for.
Thousands of participants from all continents are expected to take part in Klimaforum09. Special efforts are being made to invite people from regions in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania who will suffer most from climate change.
The klimaforum09 programme offers a wide variety of workshops, debates, exhibitions, and cultural events focusing on climate change from a global perspective.
Klimaforum09 opens 7 December and ends 18 December. The summit takes place in large, modern facilities at DGI-byen close to the Central Station.
Klimaforum09 is organized by a broad coalition of Danish and international environmental movements and civil society organizations.
At Climate Camp UK, in London, we kept getting asked “where we going to Copenhagen (for COP15 and to get involved in the network of Climate Justice Action ?”. The answer eventually was “we would like to, if we could afford it and had something serious to do!”. We developed a couple of ideas, one was a Climate Social Forum, in the World Social Forum principles and process.
After a little enquiry was informed there is government funded civil-society forum: Klimaforum09, which sounds rather like the European Social Forum, Malmo 2008 in its left-establishment (vertical-left) support. On the surface its structured like a World Social Forum, but under-the-hood, its a government funded conference for NGO’s, an extension of Nordic soft-power public-diplomacy.
However the Kilmaforum2009’s 9 themes and the attending organisations are right-on and would love to work-out how to go and work on Gaia Permaculture and the Permaculture Worker Cooperative Movement projects. The Klimaforum2009 creator is a Danish permaculturalist: Tony Anderson. So, its an amazing opportunity, will try to reconnect with Malmo solidarity accommodation types and contact the Nordic permaculture contingent, and the Klimaforum online forum.
Glocalisation of climate
My major unresolved question with solutions, revolves on this reflexive obsession with localisation. It’s a kind of allergic reaction to the Washington Consensus modality of globalisation. Pure localisation just wont work. Globalisation is real; climate, weather, migration of organisms including people, trade etc. We live on a planet with a global climate.
Are we going to localise climate? It's a nonsense.
The mindless business mantra of “Think Globally, Act Locally” is largely to blame. Corporations and the rich don’t limit themselves to this, they Think Globally and Act Globally. They Think Locally and Act Locally. Everyone knows the edge between the global and local is the most corrupt level of government, its the place where organised crime operates, dodgy planning occurs, corporations do things, see The Power Elite. Indeed there is a term; Glocalisation
Organisation needs to come from below but continue to the global level. We saw very large worker cooperative industrial democracy at Mondragon: from team to very large groups of 100 000s. It is possible to organise modern, industrial society with democratic decision-making and ownership. We need more highly organised social and economic arrangements. The anarcho-syndicalists also did it in Spain before betrayal by the liberal democracies, Socialists and Communists.
Democracy is a fractal. It can work on all scales and all systems.
One very promising discovery, which could be a lead-in to Gaia Permaculture is the plan developed by Tony Anderson and the Scandanavian Permaculture network for the Øresund Bioregion and the global plan for 10 000 trees.
Animals migrate yearly, organisms move. So do people. We need technology, transport, communications etc. While COP15 progresses inside, Kilmaforum09 runs outside. COP15 is top-down, and Kilmaforum09 is bottom-up. But where do they meet ? The place where globalisation meets localisation is where corporations, the rich and the powerful control the present and the future. One of the reasons localisation is so popular is that its is so harmless and diffuses energies away from real political economic change into gardening. As Mollison said, ad nauseum, permaculture is more than a gardening system. Again, keep coming back to Gaia Permaculture wiki project. Me thinks the Rose Room will be good for developing the wiki.
Thucydides (ca. 460 B.C.-ca. 395 B.C.) stated: “[T]hey devote a very small fraction of time to the consideration of any public object, most of it to the prosecution of their own objects. Meanwhile each fancies that no harm will come to his neglect, that it is the business of somebody else to look after this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately, the common cause imperceptibly decays.”[10]Aristotle (384 B.C.-322 B.C.) similarly argued against common goods of the polis of Athens: “That all persons call the same thing mine in the sense in which each does so may be a fine thing, but it is impracticable; or if the words are taken in the other sense, such a unity in no way conduces to harmony. And there is another objection to the proposal. For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few.”[11]
Another obstacle, free-riding, creates the second order social dilemma concerning who will bear the cost of policing the rules once they are agreed upon. So although the overall formula is simple – social dilemmas can be solved through institutions for collective action that are built by overcoming known obstacles – in practice, each group that struggles to build an institution works under the handicap of being largely unaware of knowledge about how such institutions succeed and fail.
In comparing the communities, Ostrom found that groups that are able to organize and govern their behavior successfully are marked by the some basic design principles:
Group boundaries are clearly defined.
Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
A system for monitoring member’s behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
A graduated system of sanctions is used.
Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.
For CPRs that are parts of larger systems: appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.
Definitions The commons is a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest. Studies on the commons include the information commons with issues about public knowledge, the public domain, open science, and the free exchange of ideas — all issues at the core of a direct democracy.
Common-pool resources (CPRs) are natural or human-made resources where one person’s use subtracts from another’s use and where it is often necessary, but difficult and costly, to exclude other users outside the group from using the resource..
The majority of the CPR research to date has been in the areas of fisheries, forests, grazing systems, wildlife, water resources, irrigation systems, agriculture, land tenure and use, social organization, theory (social dilemmas, game theory, experimental economics, etc.), and global commons (climate change, air pollution, transboundary disputes, etc.), but CPR’s can also include the broadcast spectrum.
The governance of natural resources used by many individuals in common is an issue of increasing concern to policy analysts. Both state control and privatization of resources have been advocated, but neither the state nor the market have been uniformly successful in solving common pool resource problems.
After critiquing the foundations of policy analysis as applied to natural resources, Elinor Ostrom here provides a unique body of empirical data to explore conditions under which common pool resource problems have been satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily solved. Dr. Ostrom first describes three models most frequently used as the foundation for recommending state or market solutions.
She then outlines theoretical and empirical alternatives to these models in order to illustrate the diversity of possible solutions. In the following chapters she uses institutional analysis to examine different ways–both successful and unsuccessful–of governing the commons. In contrast to the proposition of the tragedy of the commons argument, common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water rights, and fisheries.
Products are the fruit of complex interrelationships between people, places and the environment. Until recently it was almost impossible to understand the impact of modern manufacturing on our society. We are building Sourcemap as a tool for sharing, research and invention around supply chains.
Thanks to extensive research on the part of many people and the vast resources of web2.0, we are bringing Sourcemap to the public in the hope of promoting a culture of transparency, sustainability and invention. This blog will serve as a forum for discussing the development process, including our goals, our methods and the findings from our field studies.
Sourcemap is the product of a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory and the Creative Synthesis Collaborative, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA). We welcome solicitations and feedback on this blog.
This is the trailer for the DVD documentary Climate Engineers: War, Profit and Full Spectrum Dominance. It is a visual document of aerosol activity over New York City. We used it as a premium to raise money for Pacifica Radio. Listeners loved it. This is a 56 minute DVD with great footage and stills, stop and starts, etc. A must have for those who are dealing with debunkers and naysayers, in the family or with friends. More information at www.newyorkskywatch.com
A PACIFICA RADIO DOCUMENTARY: Transcript
Never before in our lifetimes have we experienced such weather extremes and dramatic climate in a short period of time. The sudden climate change has the full attention of scientists and climate institutions around the world.
The debate is open as to what’s mainly driving extreme weather. It’s political, complex, ranging from earth and solar cycles to automobile and utility emissions. Numerous climate studies have weighed the manmade and the natural causes that could be contributors to global heating and changing weather patterns.
But, there’s a wild card not factored in to mainstream climate change analysis say researchers, these are the effects from deliberate weather modification and weather control.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 Film: “Climate Engineers: War, Profit, Full Spectrum Dominance”
The evening begins with an optional social hour and pot luck supper at 6pm, followed by the film at 7:30pm, followed by a discussion at the end of the film. This is a a Pacifica Documentary produced and written by Geoff Brady of Pacifica’s WBAI. The footage in this film is a video and photographic document of high atmospheric aircraft activity and related weather control programs conducted over New York City 2008-2009. The film describes how our weather has been silently stolen without permission for the purposes of scientific experimentation and use by the military as a weapon of war. Audio of NASA, U.C. Berkeley, and Stanford scientists reveals the disconnect in their thinking as they casually discuss manipulating the climate to solve “Climate Change” and for use as a weapon, while ignoring the effects that dumping massive quantities of metal aerosols into the atmosphere will have Earth’s life systems.
Time: 6pm pot luck, 7:30pm films.
Location: Humanist Hall, 390 27th St. & 411 28th St., Between Telegraph & Broadway, below Pill Hill, Oakland.
Cost: $5 donations are accepted.
Info: 510-681-8699, http://www.humanisthall.net/
Wheelchair accessible.
An effective training for communities to exercise local governance by passing ordinances to protect their environments from being destroyed by outside corporations. This schooling has helped hundreds of towns and municipalities to take control of their communities to successfully resist corporate “personhood” by educating and uniting people into true democratic action. A tool for powerful activism.
The Daniel Pennock Democracy School is a stimulating and illuminating course that teaches citizens and activists how to reframe exhausting and often discouraging single issue work (such as opposing toxic dumps, quarries, factory farms, etc.) in a way that we can confront corporate control on a powerful single front: people’s constitutional rights.
Democracy School explores the limits of conventional regulatory organizing and offers a new organizing model that helps citizens confront the usurpation by corporations of the rights of communities, people, and the earth. Lectures cover the history of people’s movements and corporate power, and the dramatic recent organizing in Pennsylvania by communities confronting agribusiness, sewage sludge, and quarry corporations. Included with enrollment in the Democracy School is a 300 plus-page notebook of background reading material, and a copy of Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy. For a historical review of the Pennsylvania work through the end of 2003, see a feature article that appeared in Orion Magazine.
Created by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and Richard Grossman, co-founder of the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), Democracy Schools were launched with five weekend sessions at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in 2003. Since then, the number of schools has grown rapidly. In 2006, there are over a dozen locations across the country offering Democracy Schools, so peruse our list and find a school near you!
Sued by the forest, Should nature be able to take you to court?
Last February, the town of Shapleigh, Maine, population 2,326, passed an unusual ordinance. Like nearby towns, Shapleigh sought to protect its aquifers from the Nestle Corporation, which draws heavily on the region for its Poland Spring bottled water. Some Maine towns had acquiesced, others had protested, and one was locked in a protracted legal battle.
Shapleigh tried something new – a move at once humble in its method and audacious in its ambition. At a town meeting, residents voted, 114-66, to endow all of the town’s natural assets with legal rights: “Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable and fundamental rights to exist, flourish and naturally evolve within the Town of Shapleigh.” It further decreed that any town resident had “standing” to seek relief for damages caused to nature – permitting, for example, a lawsuit on behalf of a stream.
Ecuador‘s new constitution of 2008 is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights.[10]
The borough of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania passed a law giving ecosystems legal rights. The ordinance establishes that the municipal government or any Tamaqua resident can file a lawsuit on behalf of the local ecosystem.[11] Other townships, such as Rush, followed suit and passed their own laws.[12]
This is part of a growing body of legal opinion proposing ‘wild law‘. Wild law, a term coined by Cormac Cullinan (a lawyer based in South Africa), would cover birds and animals, rivers and deserts.[13][14]
Ecuador Approves New Constitution: Voters Approve Rights of Nature
Ecuador Follows Lead of U.S. Communities: First Country in the World to Shift to Rights-Based Environmental Protection, Working With Legal Defense Fund
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
By an overwhelming margin, the people of Ecuador today voted for a new constitution that is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights.
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is pioneering this work in the U.S., where it has assisted more than a dozen local municipalities with drafting and adopting local laws recognizing Rights of Nature.
Over the past year, the Legal Defense Fund was invited to assist the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly to develop and draft provisions for the new constitution to put ecosystem rights directly into the Ecuadorian constitution. The elected Delegates to the Constituent Assembly requested that the Legal Defense Fund draft language based on ordinances developed and adopted by municipalities in the U.S.
“Ecuador is now the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights,” stated Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
“With this vote, the people of Ecuador are leading the way for countries around the world to fundamentally change how we protect nature,” added Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Legal Defense Fund.
Article 1 of the new “Rights for Nature” chapter of the Ecuador constitution reads: “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public bodies.”
Here’s the latest from END:CIV. Both clips include footage and interviews we shot during our west coast tour. Interviews include Ward Churchill, John Zerzan, Lierre Keith and Dr. Michael Becker.
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