This is less than a 2 minute read
In our culture, control and separation are given more importance than compassion and relationship.
To illustrate what I mean, here's a comparison between the dominant approach to healthcare and the marginalized, "alternative" approaches.
This post is about a 2 minute read
Real food is more expensive than supermarket food if you measure only in dollars. But here’s the thing: if you can measure its value in dollars, it’s not really real food.
The value of food was never meant to be measured. To measure something, you have to separate it out from the other things it’s connected to. As soon as you do that, it becomes a hollow copy of what it was before it was isolated.
About a 5-minute read
Its normal for us to compete for scarce resources and to view with suspicion those who are different from us. But it’s natural for us to see through our differences and to collaborate, cooperate, and support each other.
Part 1 of a Series: "When Nothing You Can Do Makes a Difference"
Approximately a 4 minute read
January of a new year and a new decade is already over, and most of us have been reminded that resolutions and to-do lists and bucket lists don’t come to fruition via wishful thinking.
And as catastrophic fires burn into 2020 in Australia following unprecedented 2019 fires in California, Canada, Alaska, Greece and Brazil, as school children march in city streets asking for policy change, and as all of us face—or hide from—our concerns about what our future holds…
… you may have wondered, this January, whether you should be doing more than just making personal resolutions about living a better life?
But how can we do more than we already are? And how can we have any impact?
5 minute read | Part 5 of a 5-part Series| Also published at PermacultureNews.Org
Self-determination is the ability to re-parent ourselves: to learn new ways of being that may be very different from the ways we learned as children.
This is difficult, uncomfortable work, but it broadens the path for the feet that follow, making it easier for all of us to out-grow not only consumerism but also all the forms of separation and alienation from each other and from nature that have befallen us.
This article follows on from “Out-Growing Consumerism: School, Screens, and Our Kids.”
Part 2 of 2; Part 1 is here | Approximately a 6 minute read | Originally published 5th February, 2019, on PermacultureNews.org
How did we become dependent on the doctor visit and the prescription? What happened to the ways we cared for our families before modern pharmaceutical medicine?
When the globalized economy replaces local ways of living, people exchange broad skills and community-reliance for specialized career paths.
Instead of sharing time and resources with family and neighbors to meet everybody's needs, people start to work jobs to pay for basics — and also for new commodities that are assumed essential to living a modern life.
Paying for your needs with money means you need not rely on friends and neighbors, so families and communities are no longer so tightly bound together. Instead of relying on themselves and each other, families now rely on corporate providers and outside experts.
Local knowledge fades away and the understanding of natural remedies grows dim, all but replaced by the profitable kind of medicine that only experts know.
Part 1 of 2; Part 2 is here | Approximately a 6 minute read | Original version published 30/1/19, on PermacultureNews.org
Our culture loves the quick fix.
The quicker it works and the less effort we have to put into it, the better we like it. We have fast food, fast internet, fast aps, and... pharmaceutical medicine.
Pharmaceutical medicine is the medical equivalent of fast food – its fast, its convenient, and it erodes our health over time.
In contrast, at-home healthcare and natural remedies are like home-cooked, real food – they take more time and effort and they work more slowly.
Over time, at-home healthcare and natural remedies build robust health on many levels, individual and collective.
Part 3 of a Series | Approximately a 6 minute read | Originally published 19th October, 2018, on PermacultureNews.org
This article shares the funny antics of one of our roosters, whose stories include such things as nesting boxes, interested hens, and a falling wheelbarrow.
It concludes on a more serious note, with the question,
"Can good husbandry, regenerative agriculture, and morally right living, be defined in terms of happiness and connection?"
If you are interested only in rooster adventures, this article will be fine to read by itself.
But if you missed the earlier articles in the series, and you’re interested in what backyard chickens have to do with the interconnectedness of all things, you’ll need to go back to the beginning of Part 1. Part 2, if you need it, is here.
Part 2 of a Series | Approximately a 6 minute read
Originally published 10th October, 2018, on PermacultureNews.org
This article is Part 2 of a Series that is mostly about chickens – not how to care for them, but how to appreciate them as being more complex and interesting than most of us give them credit for.
If you are interested only in chickens, and especially mother hens and chicks, this article will be fine to read by itself. But if you want to know more about where interconnectedness comes into the story, and why it’s important, you’ll need to go back and read the beginning of Part 1.
Part 1 of a Series | Approximately a 5 minute read.
Originally published Oct 3rd, 2018, at PermacultureNews.org.
This 3-Part Series starts off with our cultural lack of understanding about our place in the web of life, which is at the root of why our efforts to address ecological destruction aren’t working yet.
If you were mainly interested in chickens, stay with me – I’ll get onto backyard chickens in the second part of Part 1, and then I’ll stick almost entirely to chickens for the rest of the Series.
Please note, though, that this is not a “how to take care of chickens” Series (you can find those everywhere).
This is about how to appreciate chickens as more than just egg-layers and garden-scratchers. And, by extension, how to appreciate any living thing beyond just its immediately apparent functions.