One of the world’s most influential environmentalists reveals a worldwide grassroots movement of hope and humanity

Blessed Unrest tells the story of a worldwide movement that is largely unseen by politicians or the media. Hawken, an environmentalist and author, has spent more than a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, these organizations collectively comprise the largest movement on earth. This is a movement that has no name, leader, or location, but is in every city, town, and culture. It is organizing from the bottom up and is emerging as an extraordinary and creative expression of people’s needs worldwide.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of this movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and centuries-old history. The culmination of Hawken’s many years of leadership in these fields, it will inspire, surprise, and delight anyone who is worried about the direction the modern world is headed. Blessed Unrest is a description of humanity’s collective genius and the unstoppable movement to re-imagine our relationship to the environment and one another. Like Hawken’s previous books, Blessed Unrest will become a classic in its field— a touchstone for anyone concerned about our future.

To find out more about this hope-filled yet realistic book, click on the image:

This article came from: Blessed Unrest at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

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.The tradition is particularly that of the  temazcall, or sweat lodge, and has much in common with the traditions of Native Americans in the U.S.  The day that we were there, we walked over to a small cliff and our trail took us past the temazcall grounds, where maybe twenty people were entering a large tent-like structure to begin the long process. We stopped talking and walked by in respectful quiet.

Back at the lunch table, I thought of the various intentional communities I had lived in and visited, mainly back in the 60s and 70s. “How do you handle differences of opinion?” I asked, remembering some world-class arguments.

“We have meetings every Thursday evening,” he said. “Everyone comes, and we work things out. It can get intense.”

“Even the children go?”

“Sometimes.” He nodded at his seven-year-old daughter and said that she and a friend had just gone to one, when they wanted to ask permission of the community for a project they had in mind.

“Sometimes there must be conflict that isn’t solvable in a meeting like that,” I said. “Like personality issues.” My friend explained that tradition was turned to in that case, with ceremonies.

I love how rooted in the old ways this place is. There must be places of this sort all over the world, rooted in the many different cultures that exist. Organic farming is part of the way of life here. They have many plans and dreams for the future.

We ate in the leisurely Mexican manner.  Several children ate with us. “What a great place for kids,” I said to Sandro’s wife Bere.  She nodded. “My children eat at other houses too.”

Soon the children ran next door to a large trampoline, where they joined other kids and teenagers. I could tell they were all having a rousing good time.  A little later, I glanced over that way again and noticed they were all sitting companionably around the edges of the trampoline, talking peacefully.

Inspiring.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you want to  find out more about this community, here’s a blog post from a woman who was there because it’s part of the WWOOF (willing workers on organic farms) movement. Here is the page in English  for Teopantli Kalpulli at WWOOF.

In addition, Sandro has kindly said that he could answer emails at biosavia at yahoo.com.mx — just be a bit patient as he isn’t online constantly. His mother runs a BandB there, by the way.

This article came from: An Inspiring Intentional Community in Mexico at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

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.

We certainly live in challenging times, and there are so many little things we can all do to give each other a hand: phoning  a friend who is sick, giving a co-worker an encouraging pep talk, volunteering in local non-profits, whatever. Online I have there are numerous communities where people help each other through rough times of all sorts, via encouragement and chat or even via donations. You really never know how much difference a small thing can make to someone else.

It’s also so comforting and useful to have people we can turn to ourselves. In Mexico,  where I’ve been living, I see how extended family does this all the time. But we Americans often live way too far from our families to ask them to do small favors for us. And here is where a network of local friends is invaluable. I’ve often tried to explan to Mexicans that what they do through their family ties, we do through our friendships.

I’ve always built community, wherever I lived, because I feel too much of a lack without it. What about you?

Some Tips for Building Community

• Talk to people.
• Stay in touch with friends.
• Offer to run errands when you are going shopping.
• Have potlucks at your house.
• Find a local helping organization that you care about and get involved.

Umm, I guess “get involved” sums it up!

Building Powerful Community Organizations: A Personal Guide To Creating Groups That Can Solve Problems and Change the World is a good book at Amazon, for taking community to new levels:

This article came from: A Sense of Community: Do You Have It? at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

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/

Right away, I liked the description in the upper right corner: “Tackling climate change and peak oil. Bringing the head, heart, and hands of communities together to make the transition to life beyond oil.” I liked both the emphasis on community and the positive approach.

As I browsed around the site, I came across a long discussion of survivalism and the transition movement. People disagreed with each other – at times heatedly – but it got me thinking about how the movements overlap.

Survivalism can mean different things to different people, but to me, this movement (in the US, which is the only place I am familiar with it)  is about being prepared for massive changes in society. I became aware of the movement in 1998, when I began reading about possible Y2K issues. Happily, none of those happened but certainly now some level of preparedness and household self-sufficiency is as good an idea as it has ever been. This includes having some extra supplies around the house, growing a garden, and much more. Some of the discussions survivalists can get into aren’t my cup of tea at all. I may be wrong, but I think there is a mindset that peak oil means societal collapse. I’m not sure of that at all.

To find out more, Survivalblog is a large, rambling site with a lot of information and arguably less of the fear-based thinking. It was mentioned in that Transition Town discussion, and I haven’t really spent much time there yet myself. I did add their RSS feed to my Google Reader just now, as I liked some of what I read.

So there’s a lot of thinking and discussion going on about how to respond to our changing world. I like community-based approaches because, well, no man is an island.

This article came from: Transition Towns and Survivalists: Two Overlapping Responses to Climate Change, Peak Oil, and Other Crises at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

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.

How to Use Twitter: Get Your Account and Fill Out Your Settings

Go to www.twitter.com and sign up for a free account. You will need to choose a username. Since Twitter allows multiple accounts, you may want to choose a name that reflects a specific interest. I was already trainingdogs but wanted a new name, to keep the activity separate for my two interests. The name of this website, simplegreenliving.com, turned out to be a few characters too long even without the dot com, so I opted for simplegreenlife.

Your homepage at twitter will become twitter.com/ followed by your new username. Go there and watch the tweets scrolling down. Someone will be describing their lunch, someone else using cryptic abbreviations, someone else ranting, somebody asking advice, and others posting funny-looking links to websites. Don’t expect it to make much sense just yet.

Once you’ve done that, go to your settings page and put in your name. I used my real name but if you are not comfortable doing so, then don’t. Whatever you put will be publicly viewable. If you have a website, there is a place to put it and this will get you some traffic. There is also a link to a page that tells how you can put your twitter activity into your website.

Next there is a place for a one-line bio which can be up to 160 characters in length. This turns out to be more important than you might think, as other people will decide to follow you partly based on what you say here. After a feeble start, I ended up saying: Resources, reviews, reflections on simple green living: dwellings, food, gardening, health, transport, community, etc., from old hippie librarian. You can change this later.

Do upload a picture or an image. Nothing screams “Newbie!” louder than the default image twitter puts in. I used a photo of myself because I think it helps me stand out as a specific person in the fast-moving pace on Twitter, but I also notice that some logos stand out too.

Now go ahead and post a few tweets. Make them interesting and useful, as some people will check out your activity to decide whether to follow you.

Find People to Follow

I suggest you head for the twitter search page. Once there, search for a word or phrase that interests you. If it’s a phrase, put it in quotes. Even using the word green will get you started, though you’ll be seeing tweets about green tea or green apples too.

Some of the tweets will interest you. Right-click on the usernames next to the images, and open several in new tabs. Then take a look at their pages. (You can get ideas for your own page background, discussed later, from theirs.) You can read several of their recent tweets. If you decide you would like to follow them, click on Follow in the little gray box.

Notice in the upper right area of the screen, for each profile you’ll see the number of people they are following, the number of people that are following them, and how many updates (tweets) they have posted. Here’s an example that came up when I searched green on the twitter search page: http://twitter.com/greenbiztweets had at that time over 1700 others that he was following, almost as many followers, and over 900 updates. So that’s a very active profile, and thus a great way for you to find a lot of people to follow right away. Click on either following or followers, and a page will load showing the usernames and images. If you hold your cursor over the usernames, you will see the bios and you can decide whether or not you want to follow the person or business; you can also go to their twitter page. So click away, and soon you will be following a bunch of people. I hope you’ll  follow me: http://twitter.com/simplegreenlife

I suggest you just do a couple dozen or so now, and then make this an ongoing activity. The reason to do just a few now is that many people will follow you back when you follow them, and they will be more likely to follow you if you seem interesting.

Using Twhirl or Tweetdeck

You can do all your twitter activity from your twitter webpage, but there are other options. There is at least one Firefox plugin that I haven’t tried. Twhirl and Tweetdeck are free programs you can download to do your twitter activity from. I use them both at present. I started with Twhirl for my dog training interest, and just recently began using Tweetdeck. I like it MUCH better, but since it only can handle one account at present, I have continued to use Twhirl for dogs and use Tweetdeck for my green activities.

I like Tweetdeck best for two reasons: It can take up the whole screen so you can see more action at one time – direct messages and replies can each have their own column –and you can create groups. I’ve got one called TOP PICKS, where I put the people I want to follow closely. This one feature is great because I can follow lots of people and yet really watch certain ones closely. The potential to get overwhelmed, or to fritter too much time twittering, can be managed this way. I routinely skim the column with all the people I am following and add the most useful ones to my top picks group.

Some Power User Tools

There are many, many websites that offer useful features to add to twitter. Here are a few that I use:

http://cli.gs is great for creating short urls AND for tracking them in real time. For example, I can see that 16 people clicked on a tweet I did yesterday, where my husband blogged about a global warming video he’d seen online. The stats turn up almost immediately, unlike some other sites of this sort.

http://socialtoo.com/ will save a lot of time because it will automatically have you follow anyone who follows you, and if you wish you can send them a direct message automatically. I had read that some people consider this spammy, but lots of people in the green field do it and I do too. My message thanks them for following me and invites them to come see www.simplegreenliving.com — I am quite willing to follow anyone who follows me because of the way I am using Tweetdeck to pick out the ones that I really watch closely.

There are a variety of ways to have your blog posts automatically turned into tweets. Be aware that if this is all you do, people may well consider you a spammer. You need to take part in the community discussions to have a genuine presence. I’m not doing this now, but plan to when I travel… since I blog on Wordpress, I can set up my blog posts for future dates and have them automatically tweet. I am waiting for a plugin that you can use with cli.gs because I like their tracking so much: http://www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/ can be used now and he’s currently working on how to get it to do future-dated blog posts.

http://twitpic.com allows you to post pictures into twitter. You can use Twitpic from within Tweetdeck. Looked to me like any pictures you posted would be available for others to put on their sites with some code at Twitpic.

A useful way to find more people to follow and be followed by is at www.mrtweet.net – or just follow him at http://twitter.com/MrTweet and he will send you an email.

You can customize your page background via the settings, and you can do a custom background if you wish. I got a free one at www.tweetbacks.com and added images and text in Photoshop Elements. I don’t think this is necessary, but it’s a professional touch and another way to make yourself accessibly. People put their contact data on the screen this way frequently.

Be sure to make Twitter a regular part of your daily activities, as there are so many ways that it can help you become more active environmentally. You’ll be able to keep up with any aspect of green living that interests you by choosing the people you follow. You can be inspired by what some of them are doing. You can find blogs to read, green product information, and more.

Do also make time to make changes in how you use resources, or none of the knowledge will affect our earth… I believe that humanity is in for some rough times ecologically (they have already started, no doubt you have noticed), and that whatever each of us does to live more simply can make a difference in how severe the changes are. – Zana Hart, simplegreenliving.com

Feel Free to Use this Blog Post

If you would like to use this blog post on your own blog or website, you are welcome to cut and paste the whole thing, provided you keep it intact and the links live. It’s fine if you don’t use this box.

This article came from: How to Use Twitter for Greening the Earth at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.

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?

… [They embark upon] a process of:

* awareness raising around Peak Oil, Climate Change and the need to undertake a community-led process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon emissions
* connecting with existing groups in the community
* building bridges to local government
* connecting with other transition initiatives
* forming groups to look at all the key areas of life (food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods, etc.)
* kicking off projects aimed at building people’s understanding of resilience and carbon issues and community engagement
* eventually launching a community-defined, community-implemented “Energy Descent Action Plan” over a 15- to 20-year timescale

… The community also recognises two crucial points:

* that we used immense amounts of creativity, ingenuity and adaptability on the way up the energy upslope, and that there’s no reason for us not to do the same on the downslope

* if we collectively plan and act early enough there’s every likelihood that we can create a way of living that’s significantly more connected, more vibrant and more in touch with our environment than the oil-addicted treadmill that we find ourselves on today….

The Transition Town movement started in the UK, and it has spread there very quickly.

Now it’s reaching out to other parts of the world, including the US.

Here’s a wonderful slideshow — with great music –

about the many Transition-Town communities in New Zealand. It’s about 4 minutes long:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APMTXrIL48A

Here’s an excellent talk by Rob Hopkins, one of the founders of the Transition Town movement:

http://www.ifg.org/programs/Energy/triple_crisis_av/panel5/3rob-v.htm

Here’s a PDF file about the Transition Network (14 pages), “Who We Are and What We Do”:

http://www.transitionnetwork.org/Strategy/TransitionNetwork-WhoWeAreWhatWeDo.pdf

And here’s a PDF file (51 pages) of the Transition Initiatives Primer:

http://transitionnetwork.org/Primer/TransitionInitiativesPrimer.pdf

These PDFs contain information and guidelines that show a lot of wisdom about the psychology of an enterprise like this, and about connecting and partnering with different segments of the community, including local governments.

This article came from: Transition Towns at Simple Living, Sustainable Living.