I’m, uhm, a little behind on my magazine subscriptions. I subscribe to only two: YES! magazine (quarterly) and Orion magazine (6/year), and still I can’t keep up. But today I finally got a chance to pick up the Spring 2011 issue of YES! And there I read the column by Colin Beavan, aka, No Impact …
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Riot for January 2012 – Month 39
This is the Riot for the month of January 2012 for the three of us. My summary of the first three years is here. Edson fixed the calculator: all go tither to crunch those numbers! Gasoline. Â Calculated per person. Our bugbear again. DH’s shuttle to work wasn’t running because of the holidays, so he had …
The Summits
We will remember within what walls we live, and understand that this level life has its summit…. and we have only to stand on the summit of our one hour to command an uninterrupted horizon. H.D. “Thorough” (as I now properly pronounce it), “A Walk to Wachusett” Last year, in April, we held a Transition …
On Speaking Up and Speaking Out
Some people in my town who have seen me speak publicly have come up to me and mentioned that I do not seem used to it. Â That is true. I used to be a teacher (TA) in college, but that kind of speaking was very different from Speaking Up, which is what I call what …
Pod Meadow Walk
A friend came to visit us and after eating homemade Belgian waffles I suggested I take her and my family to Pod Meadow, which I had discovered on a walk with Transition earlier in the week. The weather was a balmy 55F and only partially overcast. Pod Meadow is an amazing conservation area in my …
Mixed Up Library
Yesterday I finally straightened out my library. I found it to be a strange mixture of Gardening, Herbalism, Ecology, Botany, Beekeeping, Environmentalism, Ethics, Drawing, Interior Design, Transition, Native American history, Latin (!), etc. Also poetry and some novels (Harrison, Bass, Oliver). At the moment I’m reading Ceremonial Time, Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile …
The Dreadful Public Speaking
I was never a confident public speaker. I used to be a TA at the university where I did a lot of teaching, mostly to groups of 20 student, occasionally to an auditorium of 250. I would rehearse those hours meticulously, often to the point of learning the whole thing by heart. It was exhausting, …
Home Skills: Chimney Works
Looking at the new heating season, DH and I were looking at two tasks. 1. Clean the wood stove chimney. It had been two years, so we felt it was time. Instead of hiring a chimney sweep ($150 a visit) we bought a chimney brush with rods ($165). DH climbed up (our house has only …
Bill McKibben at Occupy Boston
Last week Thursday a group of us from Transition Wayland carpooled and took the train into Boston to add our numbers to the 99% at Dewey Square. Â The special occasion was Bill McKibben’s visit. He was there to let the 99% know that the 1% is ruining it for the 100% for the sake of …
Empower *Everyone*: Leaderless Movements
Today I read this article about leaderless movements like Occupy Wall Street. The article itself doesn’t quite deliver on its promise (“The history of leaderless movements”), but it got me thinking. When’s the last time you were part of a leaderless movement? Can you remember? No guru, no one spokesperson, no one hero or “example”? …