Grid Philly - March 2009 - (Page 28) The Transition handbook by Rob Hopkins chelSea green, 2008; $24.95 Transitions Towns is a worldwide network of communities awakened to the reality that outside expertise isn’t likely to offer up salvation. In this century, we face unprecedented climate change, energy droughts, unstable food systems and global economic decline. Instead of waiting on a solution, the handbook shows how to start building our own, one small town at a time. Back in 2005, permaculture instructor Rob Hopkins published the Energy Descent Action Plan for Kinsale, an Irish town of about 7,000, offering a timetable for getting the hamlet off of oil and towards local resilience. The movement has since spawned thousands of followers, including Santa Cruz, CA and Boulder, CO. Although it has yet to reach a city the size of Philadelphia, there is no formula, and transition principals may be applicable to any neighborhood. —dana henry The Ecology of commerce: a Declaration of Sustainability by Paul Hawken harPer collinS, 1993; $19.96 Food, inc. aul Hawken, author, entrepreneur and activist, debunks the tired notion that business and the environment are somehow at odds. “Common wisdom holds that ecologists worry about nature while economists are concerned with human beings,” Hawken explains. “But economists are in fact taking care of economics, and human beings are abandoned to the marketplace.” Sound familiar? Hawken outlines, in detail, just what cheap goods are costing. Under the pressure of production our essential ecosystem has been splintered into commodities. Human beings have been marginalized into consumers, enslaved by self-imagery. Destruction drives success: Materialism lays waste to culture, jobs and wages are cut for profit, wealth divides, money destabilizes, healthcare costs spike and cancer increases while immune systems deteriorate. Government, legal systems, media outlets and even nonprofit and charitable efforts have become the hands of an invisible dictator. This is not, of course, a new story, but the beauty of Hawken’s rendition is that there are no villains, only an impending situation. In the real world, even CEOs are paralyzed against their better senses. Hawken’s precise explanation of corporate mechanics, 28 g r i d p h i l ly. c o m P Screening at the Philadelphia cineFest, march 26–april 8 tlaFilmFeSt.com however, puts fate back in our hands. Our world has been altered largely through our uninformed support, and the better we understand the system, the better we can guide its evolution. Now, the author implies, is the critical time to put down the remote and start learning. Business has led us down a dark alley, but ironically it is also our way out. This does not mean “greening,” marginal efforts that Hawken claims are little more than a sentimental reaction to Earth Day. This means redesigning a restorative economy from the ground up—a whole new style of commerce: creative, inspiring and purposeful. Sustainable businesses, which Hawken defines and draws up guidelines for, are built from our better values, not our bare weaknesses. It’s an economy to enable our future, and one that our unwritten future enables us to realize. —dana henry Never before has food been cheaper, more plentiful and more efficiently produced. So what’s the problem? Turns out there are plenty. Director Robert Kenner alternates between interviews with food industry critics such as Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, and consumers and farmers who have been victimized by the powerful industry. Meet the woman whose two-year-old son was killed by e.coli in a fast food hamburger, the farmer who lost her contract with Tyson after refusing to keep her chickens in a coop that doesn’t allow sunshine, and another farmer targeted by the food industry for saving seeds, a practice as old as agriculture itself. —alex mulcahy march 2009 http://www.tlaFilmFeSt.com http://www.gridphilly.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.