It’s quite a spectacle to behold. Here in Boulder County—Colorado home of the nation’s first carbon tax and the first city to offer property-based financing for solar installations and energy retrofits—we’re watching our County Commissioners wrestle with a proposal from six local farmers seeking official approval to grow Roundup-Ready GMO sugar beets on county-owned open space land.

Actually, the Commissioners so far have been letting their staff, Parks and Open Space Advisory Committee (POSAC), and the recently formed Food and Agriculture Policy Council (FAPC) wrestle with the issues in a series of study sessions and public hearings. The Commissioners will make their own determination on August 25.

In the process, we’ve witnessed Boulder County staff, under the direction of Special Projects Manager Tina Nielsen, make their recommendation to approve the proposed GMO sugar beets even before the study sessions or public hearings could take place. We’ve watched them distribute reams of research supporting GMOs topped off by Nielsen’s admonition not to make a recommendation based on “a philosophical stand.” Read the rest of this entry »

Making sense of economic turmoil is no small challenge. Many of us gave up on understanding the economy a long time ago. Besides, economics has always seemed to live up to its reputation as the most dismal of sciences. In the past, why would we want to study it in depth–unless we were hoping to significantly profit from economic and financial pursuits? As Woody Tasch laments in Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money, “I have had it up to–here!–with the opaque, impersonal, deathly dull dismalness of the dismal science of economics.”

But now, we have learned that hosts of experts and those in positions of considerable power and authority are themselves befuddled over what’s happening, where it’s all likely to go, and what should be done. The reason for this, of course, is that many of the fundamental assumptions of modern economics and the industrial growth society it supports are now proving to be fundamentally wrong.

Thus we are now witnessing the awesome spectacle of the rapid unraveling of a global economic system that has profoundly ravaged the earth and our communities. This unraveling is bad news for the economy, but ultimately good news for life on earth. Read the rest of this entry »

When Tom Friedman speaks, people listen.

Transition America has been listening, too.

A few weeks ago, the popular New York Times columnist came to Boulder for a public appearance at the massive Mackey Auditorium. The event was sold out weeks in advance, which was okay with me because I had no interest in attending.

However, I noticed that a number of people had been recommending that I read Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. My usual response, based on my reading of his previous The World is Flat, was something like, “Why? Tom has been dead wrong about so many things for so long. Has he changed his position?” Yes, I was assured, he is waking up.

So when a Transition supporter showed up at our office to gift us with a free ticket to Friedman’s talk, I decided I’d go myself to see what all the buzz was about. Read the rest of this entry »

[From a talk at the Rocky Mountain Sustainability Summit, Feb. 11, 2009]

One of the key issues that I’ve been wrestling with for the last year or so is this question: How do we engage whole communities in the process of Transition and relocalization, rather than just creating one more activist group in town?

I have become convinced that to do this we need to set extraordinarily high goals for our communities here, to demonstrate what’s possible. Read the rest of this entry »

I can relate to this!

New York Times, Feb. 20, 2009
By Julie Bosman

MORRISTOWN, N.J. — Cindy Dreeszen and her husband live in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. They have steady jobs, his at a movie theater and hers at a government office. Together, they earn about $55,000 a year.

But with a 17-month-old son, another baby on the way, and, as Ms. Dreeszen put it, “the cost of everything going up and up,” the couple went to a food pantry this month to ask for some free groceries.

“I didn’t think we’d even be allowed to come here,” said Ms. Dreeszen, 41, glancing around at the shelves of fruit, whole-wheat pasta and baby food. “This is totally something that I never expected to happen, to have to resort to this.”

Once a crutch for the most needy, food pantries have responded to the deepening recession by opening their doors to what one pantry organizer described as “the next layer of people,” a rapidly expanding group of child-care workers, nurse’s aides, real estate agents and secretaries who are facing a financial crisis for the first time. Over all, demand at food banks across the country increased by 30 percent in 2008 from the previous year, according to a survey by Feeding America, which distributes more than two billion pounds of food every year. And while pantries usually see a drop in demand after the holiday season, many in upscale suburbs this year are experiencing the opposite. Read the rest of this entry »