Archive for the ‘Community’ Category

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Does the the state of the world  get you down? Do you worry about the future of our children and grandchildren? For me, yes and yes… That’s why I was so delighted to discover the existence of this book:  Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World
I’ve been a fan of Paul Hawken’s for decades now, but I didn’t know that grace, justice, and beauty WERE being restored to the world on the scale that he describes. Here is the blurb about the book:

One of the world’s most influential environmentalists reveals a worldwide grassroots movement of hope and humanity Read the rest of this entry »

We recently visited an intentional community here in Mexico, less than two hours from where we live. Some Mexican friends of ours from Guadalajara had been looking for the right place to move to, and this place was it. It has over twenty families, living in regular houses. Each family seems to own its own place; our friends were renting a rather simple and very nice house, and had just purchased land within the community to build their own.

This couple invited us to visit on a recent Sunday, and I’m so glad we went. (We are currently living in Mexico, by Lake Chapala.)

“To live ecologically is important,” said our friend Sandro over lunch. (We spoke mostly in Spanish, with a bit of English here and there.)  “But it’s not everything. There is spirituality. ” I was in agreement. “And you must have tradition,” he finished.

I wondered how many Americans would have added tradition, but it’s at the very heart of the success of this Mexican community, now over 25 years old.  Teopantli Kalpulli  is out several miles on a narrow, dusty dirt road from what appeared to be an ordinary semi-rural Mexican town, which our friends said was about an hour from the edge of Guadalajara. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you have a sense of community in your life? It could take many forms. It could be knowing your neighbors and stopping to chat while walking the dog. It could be through a church or other faith-based connection. It could be through knowing other parents  if you have kids. It could be… fill in your own ways.

Of course, people vary in how important community is to them. It’s very important to me, partly because of my particular personality and also because I think community is an important element of living well in this world. Read the rest of this entry »

You may not have heard of the Transition Towns movement, but chances are you’ve heard of survivalists. What really are these two groups and how might it matter to your life?

Transition Towns are spreading throughout the world… that link takes you to an informative website about them, and I blogged about transition towns, with more links, recently. In a nutshell, transition towns (or cities, or islands, or whatever) come about when a group of people in a community get together to explore what can be done there as preparation for a world with less oil and different climates. This is a new but very vital movement and clearly one whose time has come!

I’ve been reading some about this movement, and late last night I happened to surf my way to the site for the United States transition movement: http://transitionus.ning.com/ Read the rest of this entry »

Want to do something to help the earth? Try Twitter! It’s a social networking website which anyone can join for free, and many thousands of people and businesses have. You can find people who share your interests and communicate with them via 140-character posts. You wouldn’t think you could say much in a tweet, as these posts are called, but you really can, by shortening urls and writing succinctly.

Still, I was on Twitter for over a year, just tweeting now and then, before I realized its power.  I just used it casually, in connection with my interest in dog training. But recently I decided to see if it could help me do more in greening the earth.  I have found many other people on Twitter who share this interest. They comment and pass along links to informative websites; I didn’t sleep well after reading too many of those articles late one evening, but overall I am greatly encouraged to connect with so many people around the world who care and think about what’s going on with our planet. For example, here’s a story about how twitter beat the mainstream media on an environmental disaster in Tennessee.

Read the rest of this entry »

A friend just emailed information about transition towns to us. I think it’s a really exciting concept. Here is some of that email…

Here are some excerpts from http://www.transitiontowns.org/:

What is a Transition Town (or village / city / forest / island)?

It all starts off when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges and opportunities of Peak Oil and Climate Change? Read the rest of this entry »