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Rubbish

Eventually, when it was clear that things could not go on as they were, and it was obvious to everyone that matters were now completely out of hand, that something had to be done, we had a meeting in the town hall, all of us crowded in.

Order. Now.

There are five essential sweaters I need this season, and one must-have denim that’s guaranteed to flatter every body style, even mine. There are eleven things I could throw away today to reduce clutter immediately and start living my life more freely. Why am I waiting? There are only three more hours to purchase buy-one-get-two-free candles that provide over 150 hours of burn time.

If Your House Is On Fire

Kathleen Dean Moore On The Moral Urgency Of Climate Change

Every decision that we make — about where we find information, where we get food, what we wear, how we make our living, how we invest our time and our wealth, how we travel or keep ourselves warm and sheltered — is an opportunity for us to express our values both by saying yes to what we believe in and by saying no to what we don’t believe in.

Prophet Of Modest Profit

Woody Tasch On How Not To Get Rich Quick

We use the power of entrepreneurship but support the entrepreneurs who design businesses to solve social and environmental problems and are committed to bioregions and communities. I’m especially interested in agriculture as a place to create that change. We’re not investing enough in small-scale, organic agriculture. Rapid economic growth has created tons of cheap food with a long shelf life, but it’s destroyed family farms, which are vital to rebuilding and preserving soil fertility.

Busted

Dean Baker On The Price We’re Still Paying For The Housing Bubble

Conservatives tout the free market as the backbone of our economic system but hide the fact that they’re stacking the deck to serve their interests. The option of leaving the market alone doesn’t exist. Show me someone who’s made lots of money, and I’ll show you how we wrote the rules so that he or she made money. Bill Gates is a rich man because the government granted him a monopoly on his Windows software programs. If I sell you Windows without Bill Gates’s permission, he’ll sue me. That’s not the free market; that’s the way we wrote the rules. The government doesn’t have to give Gates copyright protection for Windows; there are other, better ways to finance software development.

Sunbeams

You can live without anything you weren’t born with, and you can make it through on even half of that.

Gloria Naylor

The Decline And Fall Of The Suburban Empire

James Howard Kunstler On Reshaping The American Landscape

I hear two themes that both represent a big fantasy. One is the techno-triumphalist fantasy that assumes we’re going to invent our way out of our problems: some mythical “they” will come up with a techno-rescue — a new miracle fuel to keep the cars running, or something like that. The other fantasy assumes that we’re going to organize our way out of this mess. Both tend to ignore the likelihood that we’re going to be living in a more disorderly society with a lot of people who are unhappy and perhaps violent and who are going to be making disruptive political claims.