I loved this recent story from the Washington Post, about an intentional community in North Carolina called Earthaven. It’s a next-generation approach to some of the same ideals that drove the communes of the 60s, only with a peak oil motivation, more professionals and retirees, and a more entrepreneurial, business-savvy approach. As these folks attest, it’s an ongoing challenge to make it work, and they haven’t achieved true sustainability yet. But you gotta love the effort. I believe that groups such as these will serve as very useful models for other communities as they prepare to powerdown and relocalize.

Another Way

By Joel Achenbach

The Washington Post, Sunday, November 19, 2006

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/14/AR2006111400979.html

It’s not easy to get your head around all that’s happening in the world today, but Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy does a very effective job of rounding it up without sacrificing the truth. I think she has a fearless, fair, and balanced view of what’s happening in the world, but it might hurt a little. As she says at the outset of this video, she has a critique of nationalism, and it is also indeed a critique of American foreign policy, particularly toward Israel, but it’s not anti-national, or anti-American, while still remaining sympathetic to the Palestinians. She has her detractors, as dutifully listed in her Wiki, but every revolutionary does, and besides, having a ballyhooed economist call your critique of globalization “shallow” is sort of self-reinforcing, isn’t it? I think she’s got a great message with lots of good food for thought.

Her most recent book is An Ordinary Person’s Guide To Empire. Among her many other books are two that she co-authored with our champion of justice, Noam Chomsky!

I found this video in another blog, While the Earth Burns by Jeremy Kirouac, a hip Canadian cat with a blog that feels like one of GRL’s Canadian brethren. Check it out, there’s a lot of interesting video material there. He says:

This is a ‘must see’ 64 minute documentary film.

In 1997 Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her novel The God of Small Things. In 2004 she was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize.

The film examines the widely unregarded worlds of Anthropology and Geopolitics in a very dynamic manner, and is probably stylistically quite unlike any documentary that you have previously seen.

It covers the world politics of power, war, corporations, deception and exploitation. It is particularly hard hitting when it comes to the United States and western powers in general.

Its unconventional style has proven to be very successful in engaging younger viewers – many of whom find more traditional content dealing with these subjects quite dry and uninteresting. It is almost in the style of a music video, featuring contemporary music (lush, curve, love & rockets, boards of canada, nine inch nails, dead can dance, amon tobin, massive attack, totoise, telepop, placebo and faith less) overlaid with the words of Arundhati Roy, and images of humanity and the world we live in today

–CArundhati
Roy – We (Video)

Home page for this video: http://www.weroy.org/index.shtml

About The Film

“We” is a free documentary produced by an anonymous student in New Zealand. He (or She) goes by the name “anon”. It was released for free on the Internet and first appeared at an Australian web site called resist.com.au. ”

“This is an unusual kind of underground production. An anonymous sympathiser has edited a video recording of Roy’s speech over 64 minutes, interspersing an impressive array of archival footage to illustrate themes and specific historical events. Contemporary music overlaid throughout the piece shifts the mood and quickens the pace. The result is a visual essay rather than a traditional documentary, perfectly suited to its creator’s intentions, which is to spread the anti-imperialist, social justice politics of Arundhati Roy everywhere.”

Here’s another rare, good piece of journalism about peak oil, global warming, and redesigning communities. This is an excellent primer for those who are still getting up to speed on those topics. Highly recommended.
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The world certainly has changed a lot in the last two years. Peak oil has been covered by many of the mainstream media,
documentaries about global warming and energy and alternative vehicles are out, books about energy are being published at a breakneck pace, and there’s even a peak oil caucus in the House (thanks to Rep. Roscoe Bartlett and Rep. Mark Udall). Many regular folks are starting to wake up and pay attention to where their energy is coming from, and what that means for geopolitics and American foreign policy. The drumbeat has begun!

On the other hand, most of the reportage I’ve seen is either wrong or politically twisted or just badly done (did anybody see that horrible abortion of a production called “We Were Warned: The Coming Oil Crisis” that CNN did back in March?), and full of misinformation and unreasonable projections. Meanwhile, the White House and Congress are still without any plan to wean us off of oil and natural gas and start making serious tracks to a renewable energy future. In fact, right now their biggest objective is to do more offshore drilling on the continental shelf and in ANWR, with renewable energy investment still a pittance. Apparently they still haven’t gotten the message that we can’t drill our way out of this mess.

Stay tuned, much more to come!

It’s been a long time since my last, pre-election blog. I made several false starts at resuming it since then, but the words just weren’t coming. But my reading and learning has continued unabated, and now it’s time to share some thoughts.

But before I get into that, I have to let you know that the time has also come to say goodbye to betterworld.com. It’s a sad development for me personally, but the offer and the timing was right. (It will be sold to a fine and altruistic organization called Better World Books.) I will be moving Better World to a new domain. This blog will be located at http://www.getreallist.com. So they will be offline for a while as I make the transition, and this will probably be my last blog at the current site.

GetRealList will also be taking a few turns. First, it will focus almost exclusively on energy, because my conviction has been steeled that energy is all that matters going forward. Politics, at least in the US, is all but a lost endeavor at this point. The corruption of our leadership and media, and the revolving door between politics and big business, has effectively nullified any real hope for working within the system for change and for the welfare of the common man. This era belongs to the captains of industry, and there’s really no time left to turn the ship around, even if populists did manage to gain some control over it again.

Second, it will be less oriented to disseminating information, and more focused on my opinions. I have learned that those who are willing to do their own research can find the information themselves, and those who aren’t, didn’t read the articles I was sending around anyway.

And finally, it will be a lot less concerned with building consensus, and a lot more about cutting straight to the truth, as I see it.
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