One of the people in this video, Kathryn, is a friend of mine. Have a gander at what she is saying, which is that due to a preexisting medical condition in her young son, there is no way she ever return to live in the US, because his condition would bankrupt her. I travel and work a lot in the US and two things always stand out to me about the lack of public health care in the US. First, many people I know have been kept from doing truly interesting work because they have had to remain slaves to …
Goodness that came my way this past week: Norma Flores, a participant on our Food and Society Conference core team this year, has a blog about her work for farmworker justice. Brad Ovenell-Carter and the void of voids. Dave Pollard shares a travelouge from Joanna Macy in the Tar Sands Also from Dave, The Transition Initiative. Dojo Rat on his practice over the next 50 years.
This story about Britain’s last WW1 soldier has a key them: reconciliation is possible: To the strains of the “Last Post,” and in the presence of soldiers from armies that had fought as both friend and foe, the funeral was held here Thursday for Harry Patch, the last British survivor of World War I living in this country. Pallbearers carried the coffin of Harry Patch from Wells Cathedral on Thursday in Wells, England. Born in June 1898, Mr. Patch died last month at the age of 111 at a nursing home in this southwestern cathedral city, where thousands of …
Obama has a birthday, and here are some wishes for him: Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable–indeed he will refuse–to seize the radical moment at hand. Every instinct the president has honed, every voice he hears in Washington, every inclination of our political culture urges incrementalism, urges deliberation, if any significant change is to be brought about. The trouble is that we are at one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disaster. The question is …
Reading David Holmgren’s book on Permaculture right now, sitting on my front porch overlooking the garden that we have created using some of his principles. I love the permaculture principles, because they lend themselves so well to all kinds of other endeavours. They are generative principles, rather than proscriptive principles, meaning that they generate creative implementation rather than restricting creativity. At any rate, reading today about the principle of Design from Patterns to Details and in the opening to that chapter he writes: Complex systems that work tend to evolve from simple ones that work, so finding the …