I've completed reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. It took a while, both because it is a demanding read and because I've been busy the last weeks with handy work on my house.
//jan
I've completed reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. It took a while, both because it is a demanding read and because I've been busy the last weeks with handy work on my house.
//jan
Posted at 11:18 in Doing the green thing, English, Exploring, Friendly troublemaking, Seeing the madness, Thoughtful, Zooming out | Permalink | Comments (0)
I'm well into book #3 now - The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Was intrigued by the title and so far it has been quite interesting. Will report when I'm through reading.
Posted at 10:22 in Doing the green thing, Exploring, Friendly troublemaking, New stories?, Thoughtful, Zooming out | Permalink | Comments (0)
On another level, it’s [sustainability] just a bad word. It’s technically what we would call a “negative vision.” We don’t want the unsustainable, we don’t want civilization to collapse, we don’t want the human species to fail. Well, of course we don’t want that, but those images don’t move people. “Survival” is not the most inspiring vision. It motivates out of fear, but it only motivates for as long as people feel the issues are pressing on them. Soon as the fear recedes, so does the motivation.
What we’re talking about is arguably the greatest challenge to innovation that humankind has ever faced: reinventing our whole way of living. And every single example I know of where something meaningful has happened, where people have worked at something that’s taken five years, 10 years, 15 years, it’s because of people’s excitement toward something that really draws them. It’s aspirational.
Posted at 08:45 in Doing the green thing, Exploring, Inspiring, New stories?, New world of work, Thoughtful, Zooming out | Permalink | Comments (0)
I've now spent the full 1 hour and 33 minutes to see Home. If you haven't I urge you to (it was supposed to close June 14, but seems open still). It is a remarkably beautiful film with a really grim message. A message we don't seem to be taking seriously enough...
Posted at 10:50 in Doing the green thing, English, Friendly troublemaking, New stories?, Seeing the madness, Thoughtful, Zooming out | Permalink | Comments (0)
I wrote this almost a year ago to the day. The first bit seems to be changing a little. The second has an interesting connection to my last post.
//jan
Sustainability for most today seems to be about tackling climate change. Damn, that is narrow. But arguably still an important an daunting task.
Sustainability needs to be discussed and understood better. But not from the perspective of creating sustainable human life. That is also too narrow. Instead we should be building and protecting sustainability for ALL LIFEFORMS ON THE PLANET. Focusing on sustainability the for the whole system called our planet seems to me to be the only reasonable strategy to take care of our own egoistic needs of survival. We're interdependent on the planet. We need to look beyond our own needs to save ourselves.
Posted at 16:33 in Doing the green thing, English, Exploring, Zooming out | Permalink | Comments (0)
This headline + article at Treehugger caught my eye. Thought it was brilliant and started to read, only to learn that I has misinterpreted the whole thing. When I got to this bit I realized me and Treehugger were on different wave lengths:
"The main thrust of the article is that rare earths are only known to exist in a few places in the world: Mostly China, Australia and North America, with much smaller reserves known to exist in India, Brazil, Malaysia and South Africa."
Silly me. Here I was thinking that the only place this rare stuff exists is on Earth - the planet. Not earth, as in the ground. And that we actually have a Rare Earth Dependence, meaning a dependence on the planet itself.
That was what caught my interest in the first place. The genius of saying that we don't have a fossil fuel dependence - we have a rare Earth dependence.
So much for that.
/jan
Posted at 09:34 in Doing the green thing, English, Friendly troublemaking, Seeing the madness | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 14:28 in Doing the green thing, English, Inspiring, New stories?, Thoughtful, Zooming out | Permalink | Comments (0)
This article gives a little fuel to a homemade theory of mine. It seems recessions are good for nature and booms are bad for nature. In the middle of this we have GDP as our measuring stick. So one way to put it would be to say that GDP is a good way to measure how good we are at destroying the environment.
Posted at 10:54 in Doing the green thing, English, Friendly troublemaking, Zooming out | Permalink | Comments (0)
Posted at 09:18 in Doing the green thing, English, Exploring | Permalink | Comments (0)
Jag är ingen miljöfreak på det sätt som många kan vara. Däremot är jag övertygad om att varje människa i västvärlden måste minska sitt "fotavtryck" om vi skall kunna leva hållbart på planeten. Min approach har varit att göra. I min familj har vi valt att bo i ett lite mindre hus. Vi bytt elleverans så vi bara får vindel. Vi har snart bytt ut alla glödlampor. Vi har sålt en bil och har således "bara" en bil. Den bil vi har är en elhybrid. Vi har minskat vår körning avsevärt och åker mer kommunalt. Vi köper allt mer ekologisk mat. Vi komposterar och har soptömning varannan vecka. Vi köper mindre prylar. Vi lagar och återanvänder det som går. Etc. Etc.
Posted at 10:58 in Doing the green thing, Friendly troublemaking, Svenska, Zooming out | Permalink | Comments (1)