greer
sastyk | September 3, 2010Let us start with persona, since one goes to any prizefight to see the metaphorical battle of two created characters, embodying sides, virtues, faults.
In this Corna... John Michael Greer, owner (by a whisker over Bob Waldrop) of the finest beard in Peak Oildom, Archdruid, moral descendent of Toynbee and Gibbon, considerer of declines in centuries, not weekends. No Zombies for Greer - we are Rome, and we might as well deal with it, dammit.
And in this Corna...Rob Hopkins, beardless founder of the Transition movement, permaculturist, endless energetic optimist and municipal leader, student…
sastyk | May 20, 2010Damn, I wish I'd written this! John Michael Greer takes up the Victory Garden, and puts it in its proper place - economically, politically, socially - and for zombie slaying. What's not to love? And I think he has it pretty much exactly right here - that while growing your own is never the solution to all problems, it often does mediate our potential suffering - which is why as long as there has been modernity it has been a solution to its difficulties. (Before the Victory Garden movement, there was the British cottage garden movement, a direct response to the disruptions of early…
sastyk | January 22, 2010I serve on a committee at my synagogue that brings in speakers every year for a series of talks and special meals. It is a small comittee, and before I joined, the average age of the participants was probably close to 70. The former chair is a formidable and funny woman in her early 90s, who has been a member of our shul since the 40s and who remembers everything. There are two older couples in their 60s, a woman in her 60s, myself at 37 and a friend of mine in his early 40s who just joined, pressed into it by desperate pleas for help and by the fact that it is impossible to deny Sadie,…
sastyk | January 14, 2010John Michael Greer has a superb piece up about our reluctance to seriously consider real community and organizational strategies. I think it is well worth reading for anyone interested in this question of community - because we have to ask ourselves, if this is the tool we've got, why do so few of us want to do the work? Why are so few of us able to do the work?
It's interesting to speculate about why that took place. I suspect many of my readers have encountered Robert Putnam's widely discussed book Bowling Alone (2000), which traced the collapse of social networks and institutions…