Pledge your support for the Earth and Indiginous peoples at the Skills for Solidarity web site.

Source: The Guardian

…contrary to the myth that Indigenous peoples leech off the state, resources taken from their lands have in fact been subsidizing the Canadian economy. In their haste to get at that wealth, the government has been flouting their own laws, ignoring Supreme Court decisions calling for the respect of Indigenous and treaty rights over large territories. Canada has become very rich, and Indigenous peoples very poor.

In other words, Canada owes big. Some have even begun calculating how much. According to economist Fred Lazar, First Nations in northern Ontario alone are owed $32 billion for the last century of unfulfilled treaty promises to share revenue from resources. Manuel’s argument is that this unpaid debt – a massive liability of trillions of dollars carried by the Canadian state, which it has deliberately failed to report – should be recognized as a risk to the country’s credit rating…

The stakes could not be greater. The movement confronts a Conservative Canadian government aggressively pursuing $600 billion of resource development on or near Indigenous lands. That means the unbridled exploitation of huge hydrocarbon reserves, including the three-fold expansion of one of the world’s most carbon-intensive projects, the Alberta tar sands. Living closest to these lands, Indigenous peoples are the best and last defence against this fossil fuel scramble…

Implementing Indigenous rights on the ground, starting with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, could tilt the balance of stewardship over a vast geography: giving Indigenous peoples much more control, and corporations much less. Which means that finally honouring Indigenous rights is not simply about paying off Canada’s enormous legal debt to First Nations: it is also our best chance to save entire territories from endless extraction and destruction. In no small way, the actions of Indigenous peoples – and the decision of Canadians to stand alongside them – will determine the fate of the planet.This new understanding is dawning on more Canadians. Thousands are signing onto educational campaigns to become allies to First Nations. Direct action trainings for young people are in full swing.

This is a major shift by the Arab countries – away from denial and towards acceptance of the Peak Oil (PO) narrative.

When will other Oil producing countries like Mexico and Canada follow suit? When will Montreal start to make serious infrastructure investments for a time when oil and gas are prohibitively expensive or collapse overtakes the supply chain?

Source: Fabius Maximus

The timing of the impending onset of world oil decline was not an issue at the conference, rather the main focus was what the GCC countries should do soon to ensure a prosperous, long-term future. To many of us who have long suffered the vociferous denial of PO by Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and OPEC countries, this conference represented a major change. In the words of Kjell Aleklett (Professor of Physics at Uppsala University, Sweden), who summarized highlights of the conference, the meeting was “an historic event.”

While many PO aficionados have been focused on the impacts and the mitigation of “peak oil” in the importing countries, most attendees at this conference were concerned with the impact that finite oil and gas reserves will have on the long-term future of their own exporting countries. They see the depletion of their large-but-limited reserves as affording their countries a period of time in which they either develop their countries into sustainable entities able to continue into the long term future or they lapse back into the poor, nomadic circumstances that existed prior to the discovery of oil/gas. Accordingly, much of the conference focus was on how the GCC countries might use their current and near-term largesse to build sustainable economic and government futures.

Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA’s, are a great way to support local farmers, eat local and organic produce, and make our region more sustainable.

Source: Equiterre

The family farmers in our community supported agriculture (CSA) network are taking orders for the summer season of deliveries. 

From June to October, nearly 100 farms will deliver weekly summer baskets of fresh, locally grown, organic produce to more than 500 drop-off points across the province.

Features:

• 6 to 12 varieties of vegetables in each basket
• possibility of continuing in the winter (winter basket)
• option of ordering organic meat

To make it even more convenient for you this year, we are offering more drop-off points at Metro grocery stores, as well as in some Agence métropolitaine de transport (AMT) train stations. 

Sign up now! (In French only, our apologies).

This local inspiration combines some excellent ideas. Hopefully, there is synergy in the combination and their vision can be achieved.

However, the Valhalla “movement” appears high on marketing, youth, style and organic weed. When I contacted them to offer my services to help teach them Aquaponics  (something people in the U.S. are paying me to do), I received a polite, “Thanks, but no thanks. We got that covered.”

So much for the “come join the movement” hype.

Every generation believes that it holds the answers to our societal ills and that they are uniquely modern and equipped with new technology to solve our pressing environmental and social problems. This is one of the benefits of youth.

Ideas spring with great life force when we are young. But ideas are a dime a dozen, we eventually learn. And execution is what separates the dreamers from the real sustainable builders of the future who are able to create replicable  models to be used by others.

I hope their enthusiasm and idealism can carry the day, but history tells a different story about communes, outside of the Kibutz model in Israel which was born out war and the need to defend land.

The 1960′s communes taught us that the real world of life is socially complex and needs more than just the fantasy of new technology creating a better life without conflict or injustice. Further, it has to be rooted in the here and and now rather than built on the hopes of a new tomorrow.

Our lives will be transformed, I firmly believe, on the existing infrastructure and built environment of today. The world does not need to be re-built, but rather retro-fitted to our new ideas and values that reflect cooperation and sustainability.

To create a new way of living and a new world does not call for breaking away from the existing world. Quite the opposite, it requires a deepening involvement with the world as it is, no matter how flawed. Because if they succeed, they have transformed the lives of only the people who manage to move and live there. What about the millions of other people who are stuck in the old cities, stuck in the old buildings, stuck in the old jobs? What is to come of them?

Please comment if you disagree.

Source: The Valhalla Movement

Montreal could use an urban farm school that combines all these skills like permaculture, beekeeping, Aquaponics, composting and seed saving all into one curriculum.

Source: Occupy Monsanto

Growing Our Local Food Infrastructure: Urban Farm School Opens in Asheville NC (via http://www.occupymonsanto360.org)

By Brett Gustafson Though it sometimes seems like our evil frankenfood corporate overlords, such as Monsanto and Dow, have completely hi-jacked our food system, many people around the nation are actually creating more sustainable and viable alternatives. A few good folks in Asheville, NC are bringing…

more…

This is late notice, but here it is anyway:

Source: Equiterre

A talk by Laure Waridel, cofounder of Equiterre, eco-sociologist and author

Wednesday, February 27, 2013
5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Concordia University, room H-763
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West

Hardly a day goes by without some new study being published that demonstrates the enormity of the environmental, social and economic challenges – not to say crises – facing humans both individually and collectively. What role can universities play in enhancing the transition towards real sustainability? Laure Waridel argues that building an ecological and social economy is an urgent necessity that will require thinking and action from every discipline. 

For more information, see our events calendar.

Or, please contact the organizer of this event directly:

Andrew Ross
David O’Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise
John Molson School of Business
aross@jmsb.concordia.ca
514 848-2424, ext. 5433

Adam Werbach has been at the vanguard of the sustainability movement since high school when he founded a national organization of over 30,000 student volunteers who mobilized around environmental projects. A few years later, at the age of 23, he was elected the national President of the Sierra Club – the youngest in its 100+ year history.

In 2004, Adam turned the environmentalism movement on its head by publicly decrying its outdated thinking and lack of progress, given the scope of its mission. He challenged its followers to link their goals to other broad social and economic ones in order to have more impact.

Source: Peak Prosperity

It just does not make sense to constantly make new things from the things we have that are good. It doesn’t make us happy. It is expensive. The formal economy, in durable goods from toasters to bicycles to camping equipment to kids clothing to clothing, is about a trillion dollars a year in the United States – a trillion dollars a year. The informal market for that is much bigger. That means every time you borrow something from your dad, or you give maternity clothes to your sister, or you give a hand-me-down to someone else, or a neighbor borrows a shovel, that happens many, many more times than if you go to a store. It is decreasing, actually, because of the separation that we feel in the communities we live in. What ends up happening is, it is easier to order something on Amazon.com than to ask a neighbor and see if they have it.

What we haven’t seen is the same type of software technology and care and marketing, frankly, to the informal economy as we have in the formal economy. So when we start having the same things, you would expect to see when you go to Amazon.com to know when it is available, to see a picture of it, to be able to get it delivered. The things that you have in your friends’ closets, I think the world is going to start choosing that just because it is easier, it makes sense, it saves money. Actually, in the end, it is more fun to see your friends than to click around online. I actually think it is inevitable. The challenge is, we don’t yet have enough people throwing themselves into it. I think that is why the dialog we are having today is so important and what you are trying to bring about.

Things are the way they are because we made rules to make them like this. We have to change that. We change that with recycling. That has to be a step. Recycling didn’t exist 30 years ago in America. Now most people understand that you don’t throw away valuable resources. Reuse will similarly be a norm. In the same way, we spend lots of care buying things and bringing them into our home. We will understand that maintaining those things and putting them into other people’s hands will be similarly an important and well-respected pathway.

Too bad this wasn’t reported in the newspapers or 6 o’clock news…

Source: The Royal Society of Biological Sciences

Virtually every past civilization has eventually undergone collapse, a loss of socio-political-economic complexity usually accompanied by a dramatic decline in population size [1]. Some, such as those of Egypt and China, have recovered from collapses at various stages; others, such as that of Easter Island or the Classic Maya, were apparently permanent [1,2]. All those previous collapses were local or regional; elsewhere, other societies and civilizations persisted unaffected. Sometimes, as in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, new civilizations rose in succession. In many, if not most, cases, overexploitation of the environment was one proximate or an ultimate cause [3].

But today, for the first time, humanity’s global civilization—the worldwide, increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in which we all are to one degree or another, embedded—is threatened with collapse by an array of environmental problems. Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’ [4], facing what the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems [5]. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival; land degradation and land-use change; a pole-to-pole spread of toxic compounds; ocean acidification and eutrophication (dead zones); worsening of some aspects of the epidemiological environment (factors that make human populations susceptible to infectious diseases); depletion of increasingly scarce resources [6,7], including especially groundwater, which is being overexploited in many key agricultural areas [8]; and resource wars [9]. These are not separate problems; rather they interact in two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system. The negative manifestations of these interactions are often referred to as ‘the human predicament’ [10], and determining how to prevent it from generating a global collapse is perhaps the foremost challenge confronting humanity.

The human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo sapiens’ aggregate consumption [11–17]. How far the human population size now is above the planet’s long-term carrying capacity is suggested (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis.

Source: Equiterre

This book is one of the most powerful books that I have ever read. Already I’ve read it twice and I will read it for a third time this year.

Published in 2008, this book is now available for FREE download. To get your free copy of the book, go to: GreatWavesOfChange.org

What is coming to our World is beyond what we have seen in recent history (100 years) and we need new tools and new techniques to mitigate the myriad problems we face. Extreme weather events in the U.S. have already increased 5-fold since 1980. This book gives us a clear picture of the future and the perspectives we will need to navigate our unprecedented difficulties. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Source: GreatWavesOfChange.org

In The Great Waves of Change, Marshall Vian Summers explains the steps you can take to navigate our increasingly turbulent and uncertain times. In the face of such uncertainty, Summers presents a revolutionary new way of knowing—a unique process that can be applied by people everywhere. By understanding the Great Waves and by connecting to a deeper authority within, you can find the strength, courage and inner certainty to adapt and to become a contributor, not a victim, to a rapidly changing world.

Table of Contents

• 1. The Great Waves of Change
• 2. The Great Waves and Your Life
• 3. Escaping the Past
• 4. The Freedom to Move with Knowledge
• 5. The Deep Evaluation
• 6. Relationships and the Great Waves
• 7. Preparing Your Family
• 8. The Danger of Isolation
• 9. The Great Waves Prophecy
• 10. The Great Waves and the Hidden Reality of Contact
• 11. Where Will You Place Your Faith?
• 12. Your Purpose and Destiny in a Changing World
• 13. A New Message of Hope
• 14. Seeing, Knowing and Taking Action