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Category: Resilience

Small Businesses Can Save Your Community

Small Businesses Can Save Your Community

Small businesses can be underappreciated and under-supported, and that’s a shame. After all, when a downtown is filled with cool coffee shops, locally owned restaurants, microbreweries, and quirky boutiques—together with plenty of strong non-retail players like architects, ad agencies, and attorneys—that downtown is often the heart and soul of a vibrant community. A strong small business presence—especially one that thrives in the context of a busy, livable, walkable downtown—is what gives a community its character. It creates that sense of…

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Systems Thinking and How It Can Help Build a Sustainable World: A Beginning Conversation

Systems Thinking and How It Can Help Build a Sustainable World: A Beginning Conversation

Humanity stands at a precipice. Overpopulation, resource scarcities, degraded ecosystem functioning from pollution and biodiversity loss, and anthropogenic climate change are damaging the life-supporting capacity of the planet. Diminishing returns on fossil fuel energy investments, combined with their dwindling availability and environmental harm, threaten industrial civilization. Many people recognize the need to transition to sustainable, resilient ways of living, but the prospect of such a transition is daunting, not only from a logistical perspective, but also because it requires new…

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Whose Future is This?

Whose Future is This?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxgVxu2mdZI&w=560&h=315] Stuart Candy is a futurist helping people “think and feel about things that haven’t happened yet.” Enabling people to play on a mental jungle gym of possible worlds, helping them access unique insights and explore each other’s insights….Combining real world impact, intense creativity, and a whole heap of fun, he draws people into creative thinking about possible and preferable futures.

24 Tricks to Survive Hot Summer Nights (Without AC)

24 Tricks to Survive Hot Summer Nights (Without AC)

Before we dive in, we realize the obvious solution for cool, calm, and REM-ful sleeping is an air conditioner: These modern gizmos can keep a bedroom at the optimum sleep temperature (roughly between 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit), plus provide some nice white noise to boot. But even small window units use up tons of energy and jack up monthly electric bills. So what’s an environmentally responsible, budget-conscious sleeper to do? Living through a hot summer without AC seems impossible…

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Changemakers

Changemakers

With every news report, the world seems to be careening off the rails. It’s all too easy to slip into despair waiting for co-opted, self-serving governments to act. The antidote to fear and despair is hope and action. We each hold the power to make personal changes that can drive local changes and cascade into large-scale social transformation. This is the guidebook for ordinary people who want to create a new society now. The first section explores the idea of…

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RetroSuburbia talk by David Holmgren

RetroSuburbia talk by David Holmgren

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk48lxgs-5c&w=560&h=315] Co-founder of the permaculture movement, David Holmgren, encourages permaculture activists to focus their energies on retrofitting suburbia for an energy descent future. David argues that the opportunities to retrofit are so much more important than new buildings because of the limits to debt based growth.

Medusa’s Curse: The Necessity of Art in the Climate Struggle

Medusa’s Curse: The Necessity of Art in the Climate Struggle

Because I am a literary writer, writing about climate justice, people often ask me, What is the importance of the arts in the climate struggle? I turn to Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth century German philosopher. “We have art in order not to die of the truth,” he wrote. So then. What are these lethal truths, the truths that break our hearts, sap our spirits, and turn us to stone? How can art save us in the face of those truths?…

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Emergency Planning: Preparing for Power Blackouts

Emergency Planning: Preparing for Power Blackouts

My neighbors tell me they once went 13 days without power after a winter storm. Knowing it will happen again, and dreading a stint in a shelter, I decided to get ready. Last fall I devoted a week to preparing a simple and inexpensive emergency kit that will help my family ride out 14 days without electricity. This kit gives me peace of mind because now I know the next blackout won’t be a nightmare. Life might even be pretty…

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TLTI thinking tiny (homes)

TLTI thinking tiny (homes)

When it comes to new housing, the Township of Leeds and the Thousand Islands is thinking small. Tiny, in fact. Council members decided this week to embrace the tiny-house movement that has become the darling of environmental trend-setters in the United States and Europe. They asked planning director Elaine Mallory to prepare a zoning bylaw amendment that would remove the minimum size requirements for new houses, and include tiny houses in the township’s definition of permissible dwellings. The township’s building…

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Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it

Life in a ‘degrowth’ economy, and why you might actually enjoy it

What does genuine economic progress look like? The orthodox answer is that a bigger economy is always better, but this idea is increasingly strained by the knowledge that, on a finite planet, the economy can’t grow for ever. When one first hears calls for degrowth, it is easy to think that this new economic vision must be about hardship and deprivation; that it means going back to the stone age, resigning ourselves to a stagnant culture, or being anti-progress. Not…

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