Daily Loaf

What’s the buzz on the latest issues in the Green Community? Check out what you may have missed this last week:

Living with the land: Florida’s first Earthship (video) – Eric Stewart gives a firsthand look at Florida’s first Earthship in Manatee County, and gets his hands dirty while helping out.

Not getting a million-dollar bonus this year? Think local stimulus- Scott Milinder shows us a real stimulus package that will work for us: we all commit to “Buying Local First.” According to recent economic studies, shifting your buying habits to locally owned businesses creates more circulation of money, more economic activity and more jobs in the local economy.

Eco-friendly summertime fashion accessories- Are you searching for a unique and beautiful purse to enhance your summer wardrobe? Then why not consider one of these recycled handbags that are made from recycled items that help to promote a cleaner and healthier world, reports Jen Meier.
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In previous posts, I declared the problems that our country faces. The point was not to be pessimistic but to maturely point out the weak points so we can find solutions. We face mounting debt, a dependence on a finite power source stored beneath the Earth that may have peaked production, the baby boomer generation about to enter retirement, a lack of savings, and a consumer culture built upon a dominator society that depends entirely from receiving it’s inputs of materials and things from far away. This society is unsustainable and will need to transition to something different by choice or by collapse.

This society arose when we began valuing things, more than people. It is not a recent event, but an event that has playing itself out for thousands of years. I spoke of a permaculture path. A path to improve our economy to be environmentally friendly and get us off our addiction to fossil fuels. As a by-product of utilizing these permaculture design principles we will have healthier food, cheaper costs of living, meaningful work repairing the Earth all as we return to the community way of thinking and away from individualism. We must create a partnership society, partnering with the Earth and one another to repair the damage.

What does this look like though? It’s easy to state abstract ideas on digital paper, but how about an example locally?
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What’s the buzz on the latest issues in the Green Community? Check out what you may have missed this last week:

Celebrating Independence Day or creating environmental disaster? – Kelly Rothwell looks at the littered aftermath of Fourth of July celebrations and wonder why, instead of giving back in celebration of their freedom, people decide to light off fireworks, leaving mass amounts of debris in the water and on the beach.

Local Food: Dinner in, and from, the garden at Gateway Organic Farm – Chef Gui Alinat gives information about Gateway Organic Farm’s next “Dinner in the Garden” event, an incredible local foods experience featuring nine Bay area chefs.

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Our economy is unsustainable. That means at some point in the future it will cease to be sustained. People will lose homes and jobs, and lifestyles will change. Sound familiar to our present day scenario? In my previous post I added a link to the Crash Course, a video series about the challenges America faces over the coming 10 years from our oil addiction: our generation gap of baby boomers retiring and not enough workers to pay for their retirement, our incredibly increasing debt, our lack of savings, and our exponential growth due to fossil fuel consumption resulting in a degrading supply of resources as well as destruction of the ecology we depend on for life. Peak Oil was another issue I brought up in a recent blog. All of these issues will bring about future scenarios that can play in multiple ways. (You can watch these videos from my post here.)

The context of this post will follow the future energy descent scenarios created by David Holmgren, one of the founders of Permaculture, as per his website Future Scenarios. These scenarios deal with the responses we can go forward with after the peak production of oil arises. Our country imports nearly 70% of its oil - how can our country continue this path of exponential growth if other countries deteriorate in oil exports?
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