When Will We Learn?

If the spike in fiery train derailments doesn't get us to start seriously rethinking our dependence on fossil fuels, I don' t know what will. Yet another today in Lynchburg, Virginia. So what do we do?

Some steps that we can take (this is only the tip of the iceberg, there are so many more)

• Decreasing our use of fossil fuel generated electricity by: changing to LED lighting, turning down the heat, eating more raw foods, putting lights on timers, using energy efficient appliances, reducing our reliance on electricity by hanging clothes to dry, washing clothes in cold water, and on and on. There are many great websites on reducing electricity consumption. A quick internet search will turn up dozens.
• Converting our electricity production to a non-centralized distributed grid powered by alternative energy sources.
• Converting our home heating systems to non fossil fuel systems. 
• Becoming a one car family
• Car pooling and or using public transportation
• Negotiating work from home arrangements with employers for at least part of the work week or changing employment to something closer to home.
• Reducing our use of products which are derived from petroleum. This takes some effort, research and label reading. As you know most plastics are derived from petroleum, but what some people don't realize is that many chemicals including those in our pharmaceuticals are also derived from petroleum. Other materials that contain petroleum derivatives include clothing, fertilizers, building materials, cosmetics, the list goes on, but one that might surprise you-petroleum by products can even be found in your FOOD! That's right there are petroleum by products in some food preservatives. See a PARTIAL list of products here.

Some of these steps are not easily achieved, but they are worth aiming for and they are worth working toward. Every step we take in the direction of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is a step in the right direction and buys mankind another minute of breathing freely and living well on planet earth. 

Live light my friends!

PS. I don't care what they tell you Fracked Natural Gas is NOT the solution to oil. It is just a different path down the road to destruction. 

Follow Me - Contest - Big Announcement

Pictured above is the cover of "Cool Cuisine; Taking the Bite Out of Global Warming" by Laura Stec. It is both cookbook and handbook in one. This book teaches about the science behind Global Warming and how our food choices impact our planet's health and well being. There are also a number of fun, fabulous, healthy and planet friendly recipes. A good read and great resource. The companion website http://www.globalwarmingdiet.org/ is also a great resource for information on climate change.

This post is a blatant attempt to increase readership, and why not, it's all for a good cause. I have a big announcement coming up and I want to be sure that the news gets out to as many people as possible. It's going to be brilliant, amazing, fabulous and fun!

So,  here is what I propose. I have 5 copies of this fabulous book to give away. If you would like to have your name in the drawing, please subscribe to this blog and please send me an email at awensdaughter@gmail.com to let me know that you are subcribing and would like to have your name in the drawing. Also, if you share this post with friends and they subscribe and email me letting me know that you shared the post with them I will put them in the drawing and also add your name in again for each time  someone says you recommended them. And if they invite friends who do the same I will do the same for them, and so on. So everyone who subscribes gets their name in and they get their name in again for every person who drops their name as the one who invited them. Winners will be selected by random drawing on the day of the big announcement. Email addresses will be used only for selecting and notifying winners. If you would like to be added to my mailing list for other notifications and announcements please put that into your message. Your information will never by sold or shared with anyone else. 

Please share this with as many people as possible. And, due to the nature of the announcement, please share with your friends oversees as well. Let's aim high. Stay tuned here for contest updates and for the big announcement. 

And remember:

 "Travel light, live light, share the light, be the light."

                                                                                       Yogi Bhajan

UPDATES!! Be sure to check the comments for updates on this post. Thanks!

Years of Living Dangerously

A new ShowTime series examines the causes and impacts of climate change. While I may not agree with every opinion expressed in this show, I have to say that it definitely gets you to thinking about the impacts of human habitation and activity on the planet's ecosystems. It also examines the social impacts of climate change from poverty to, corruption to war.  And it looks into the future and the further impacts of these changes on our environment and climate as we progress through the current century. Please take the time to watch the premier which is available free online at this link http://yearsoflivingdangerously.com/

I find that I can still be shocked by the unbelievable willful destruction of our beautiful wild places for no better reason than greed! Perhaps worse than the greed is the apathy and ignorance of our own individual daily choices.  We need to examine our own choices and start holding the corporations that supply our daily needs to task for the actions that they take. We need to exercise our votes in the voting booth but also in the market place. We need to be informed so that we can understand what impact our lifestyles and daily choices are having on our potential future and the potential future of humanity as a whole.

Return of Surplus - First Fruits

Today I was going to do a post on movements moving together, and I'll come back to that, because I think it is important but this morning, while feeding the compost, I was inspired to share with you an experience I had a few years ago while picking blackberries.

One of the permaculture ethics is "fair share", also referred to as "return of surplus" both terms imply several things. They imply, take only what you need and, when you have more than you need, share it with others in your community. They also imply that we should give or leave a fair share for mother earth and that we should  share the knowledge of this practice with others. If we only take and take from mother earth and never give back or replenish the soil, eventually it will be unable to produce more food to sustain us. Think of industrial agriculture as strip mining of top soil...but again I digress, we are talking about return of surplus and first fruits (and we'll come to those blackberries by and by.)

For a time we had a small bowl on our dining room table. Before a meal each of us would place a small offering from our plates into the bowl. We would also pour a small amount of our water or juice into the bowl and we would mention one thing that we were feeling thankful for that day. After the meal we would be take it out and poured it on the earth as an offering and a thanks. I miss that bowl. I want to bring it back. It is a connection to our earth that we too easily forget and it is a good reminder of thankfulness practice, which is so important in our hectic day-to-day lives. It is also a reminder that we need to think about serving the earth BEFORE we think about serving ourselves. And this brings me back to those blackberries. 

Several years ago I was out picking blackberries. There were some amazing, large, delicious, juicy fruits. I wanted to eat them all. But then I got to thinking, if I eat all of the very best berries then it will be the small, bitter and pour producing plants that reproduce and after some years all that I would have on my land would be nasty little berries that no one would really want to eat unless they had to. Now blackberries being so prolific and birds being what they are, there isn't really a very great danger of that happening too quickly, but the principle still applies and more so with other more tender, less prolific plants. And this is when I had the Aha! moment. I realized that many scriptures and folk wisdom advocate giving back the first fruits. The first fruits would be early ripening, they would also likely be some of the best. It makes complete sense. If we are going to save seed, we choose the best fruits so that we propagate the best of the specimen that we want to preserve. So seed saving is also a way of giving fair share back to the earth. But the idea here is that we need to think of giving FIRST and that we may need to make some sacrifice, but that whatever small sacrifice we make will be more than paid back by the continued fertility and fecundity of the earth. 

Grrrrr.... I'm going to rant, so just be warned.

from http://www.calyouth.org/hey-youth-vote/

Ok, so while this is not strictly what you might think of as a One Earth Revolution post because it is not exactly about the environment or social movements, it IS about our society. It's about this business of campaign finance and the insistence of our Supreme Court to be complete imbeciles when it comes to the interpretation of our Constitution. I've got a BA in political science, so I think I've got some right to rant on this and anyway, any American with at least a rudimentary understanding of the English language has a right to rant on this. And here is my issue; Spending money is not speech. I don't care how creative they get with their definitions, handing over a wad of cash is not speech and is not a protected right under our Constitution. In fact, allowing a bunch of rich fat-cats to hand over a whole lot of money to purchase the right to be the only one that a congressman will listen to is both not speech and has the very detrimental outcome of effectively silencing the free speech of ordinary Americans who don't have the means to buy themselves a congressman! No one however seems to be concerned about the abridgment  of our right to free speech or this squelching of our voices. 

Speech is speech people. It means that you have a right to say what you believe. It doesn't mean that you have a right to pay people not to listen to the opinions of other people, which is basically what this comes down to. We have the right to speak our minds, whether that be on a soapbox in the public square or on national TV. We also have freedom of the press which allows us to put into print what we want to say. That's freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

We have to stop the buying of our Congressman and there is only one way to do it. We need to mobilize the vote. We need to start letting OUR voices be heard over the voices of those with the money. We don't have a lot of money, but we all have one vote. Maybe if we all start using our votes the money wont be quite so important. Do you realize that in off year elections less than 50% of us exercise our most fundamental right as citizens? And in presidential election years it is little better, hovering around 60%. We also have the right of free speech and it is time we stop feeling like we can't do anything about the issues and start using our voices and our pens. Write to your newspaper, email your congressmen, put a sign on your front lawn. If we don't exercise our rights as citizens, we should be little surprised when we find them slowly and then more and more rapidly being stripped away from us. 

Transition- A Reprise

Totnes, Devon, England: a transition town

In a post in December I mentioned the US Transition Movement. I recently came across a couple of great videos done by the founders of the Transition movement, which I will share with you at the end of the post. But first, what is "Transition"? What's all the hype? and why is it important? Transition is a grass roots movement of people taking action toward affecting positive change in our communities and our environment surrounding the most plaguing problems addressing the world and our societies today. Problems such as access to good healthy food and quality healthcare. Issues such as community development and of course climate change, peak oil,  and economic sustainability. These initiatives have been mobilizing and unifying communities around the world for the passed 9 years. Transition groups are taking action where action is needed, at the local level, without waiting for government intervention or government funding. This is exactly the kind of action we need in order to achieve the change necessary to rebuild, reshape and reform our societies and our economies into functioning systems that will be stable and sustainable over the next century or more as we deal with the end of cheap fossil energy. 

I hope that you will enjoy and be inspired by these videos. And after you have seen them a challenge you to answer this question? Transition New England anyone? How about Mid-Coast, South East, Mid-West, South Central, North West, South West; or how about just the town, block or street where you live? Every movement starts somewhere. Why not right there, right now, wherever you are?

This first is Rob Hopkins, the founder of the transition movement, speaking about the Transition experience of his home town of Totnes, at TEDxExeter. If that gets  you excited about the Transition Towns Movement, please what "In Transition 2.0" a more lengthy, but very worthwhile video which goes more deeply into the movement and the "Transition" process.

Cheers.

Start Up Nights - A Smash Hit

This week Hubby and I attended an event put on by a terrific new local business Leaven Beer and Bread House and the group Seacoast Local; a group that encourages people to shift their shopping to products that are local, green and fair. The event was called Start Up Nights and, like the graphic above suggests, it is a competition of great local innovative ideas. Events like this are really bringing fun and creativity to the localization movement.

It all starts with the pitch. Everyone is given a "pitch plate". You write out your idea for a business and try to encapsulate what it will be, why it is important (what is its niche),  how it will be funded, how it will function and profit. You then have 30 seconds to pitch your idea and the three best ideas are selected by voice vote of the crowd. The winners of the initial pitch contest get to select teams to help them develop their idea into a down and dirty, back of the napkin business plan. There are a series of challenges designed to help you refine your idea and it all wraps up with the judges selecting the winners and awarding prizes(but that is secondary). The real prize is the collaboration and camaraderie that develop throughout the evening. 

What really impressed me was the number of pitches that centered around local food, and all of them had a strong element of giving back to the community. There was not a single pitch that was purely individualist or profit driven. This event seemed to be a great example of the types of community and awareness building events that are vital for launching a transition town movement in our local area. I hope to see more events like this cropping up (pun intended). 

We definitely plan to attend the next event April 17th at 7pm. Hope to see you there!