Category: Envisioning the sustainable future
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Overshoot day August 20: will “economic” reality meet resource reality?
Let us look at overshoot day from the point of view of economics. By economics I mean the technology of keeping track of housekeeping with resources and keeping track of material obligations to those around us. Economics does not need to be restricted to counting with money. Other measures can be used. And it is…
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Learning from the ECO-ISLANDS conference
Arriving at this year’s ECO ISLANDS conference, held on the Danish Island of Bornholm, I wasn’t expecting it to feel like a Transition meeting. I was attending the conference to discuss things related to my day job – pollution taxes. I was delighted as the conference progressed to discover that many islands around the world…
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Shifting Power, Shifting Economy
Lindsberg conference center, just outside the Swedish town of Falun, saw three days of Powershift Sweden with PUSH, a youth movement conference for action for a fossil-free society. As a fellow of ISSS (the Institute of Swedish Safety and Security) and one of the founders of Transition Sweden, I brought the complementary currency ITK to…
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Transition movement meets the Circle Way at Camp
Back in July, participants from Sweden and Denmark gathered for the annual Circle Way camp hosted by Manitonquat, a Native American who bases his teachings on traditional tribal ways. The camp, held at the Mundekulla conference center, has been going for some 11 years now. This year for the first time they were joined by…
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Where we need innovation: the economic system
The present economic system is a patchwork of taxes and subsidies and ideas that have been around since at least the 1800s. Tax upon tax has been added trying to bring control and equality to the system. The picture here shows just the CATEGORIES of transactions involved and then just the most common. If we…
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Transitioning away from fossil fuel: society is like an amoeba.
I spent a pleasant afternoon in the Swedish Town of Uppsala with the Upplandsbygd regional development organization and people involved in the Transition Towns movement from Sweden (Uppsala) and Scotland( the town of Fores) in a workshop that looked towards both regions’ development up to 2020. The workshop was organized as part of a cooperation…
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From the Charles Eisenstein event
Last night’s event with Charles Eisenstein was like listening to a spellbinding story teller, the story of the old story and the story of the new emerging. I twittered like mad until my battery ran out. Here are the tweets unedited. #ceisenstein disrupt the old story with love and kindness; miracles happen when you…
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The triple-circle economy
This diagram comes from the Swedish Sustainable Economy Foundation http://tssef.se.
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Visit to the eco-centre, Ipema, Brazil
We visited IPEMA – Institute of Permaculture and Eco-village of the Atlantic Rainforest. The center is an example of the growing energy and insight that is manifesting itself as practical projects and organisations working towards sustainability in Brazil. Combining permaculture and eco-village thinking, the center has made huge headway in creating housing of 100%…
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Transition to biomass society with a complementary currency
This white paper discusses the challenge of replacing fossil-fueled supply chains with less energy-intense renewable solutions whilst rapidly reducing the carbon in the atmosphere. It suggests that a complimentary currency, backed by carbon fees and pledges from landowners to sequester carbon using soil and biochar, could be the answer. Read the paper here. A complementary currency…