At a certain stage during the No Impact project, we got rid of the television, which kept making use feel that spending less and using fewer resources made us losers compared to the people we saw on the screen. Duane Elgin, author of Voluntary Simplicity, said something that caught my eye (thanks for sending Rosa!) […]
Society
Treating anxiety and depression could save the planet
Something a regular reader of this blog may have been able to guess about me: I suffer, at times, from anxiety and depression. I’m not talking about the worst kind of anxiety and depression. I’m talking about the kind that takes the edge off the gratitude I should be feeling for a good life. Not, […]
Sustainable living on a community level
Streetfilms posted an interesting video today about Los Angeles Eco-Village, where people have come together to enjoy the benefits of sustainable and community living. “An ecovillage is a human scale neighborhood where people know their neighbors and care about them. People can live close to where they work and play and have access to other […]
Local, ecologically-sound and economically stable
Yesterday, I posted about how investment in a network of local economies rather than one big central economy by the Obama Administration could provide not only a more sustainable paradigm but one that is more socially and economically stable. Think of the Internet. Instead of all our requests traveling through one gigantic central server, information […]
How could Obama permanently strenthen our economic well-being?
Back in July, I posted the above diagram under the title Exchange of Love. The point of the diagram is that economic policy in the modern world is generally about strengthening the bonds between corporations and individuals, rather than the other, potentially more meaningful, relationships. Under the current paradigm, this is important because it is […]
How shall we live?
Isn’t that the big question? How shall we live? We imagined for a century or so–at least here in the northern hemisphere–that we were on our way to becoming gods. We could control nature. We could move beyond the limitations of our bodies and intellects. Only the slow march of progress stood between our having […]
How to cut out home heating oil–Japanese style
This is a guest post by my friend Sean Sakamoto, who blogs at www.idratherbe.tv/injapan. “It’s so weird that you heat your whole house,” my wife said one winter. She’s Japanese, and when we first got married, here in the United States, we got a lot of mileage out of the “I can’t believe you people […]
The Fool’s journey
Now this post is going to seem a little strange–I’ll warn you in advance–but I happen to have been reading about tarot cards. Apparently, the 22 cards of the “major arcana“–the heart of the tarot deck–can be taken, in order, to symbolize the stages of a person’s inner growth. The “Fool’s journey,” as the complete […]