Rethinking Lifestyle

Have you been wondering where our federal government is finding all the money to support those who are now without jobs or without customers? I have!

To some extent we have all bought into the ideology of neoliberalism. The current pandemic is showing us the limitations of the neoliberal approach.

The South Eastman Transition Initiative may not be as well understood as some other community organizations. Some readers, for example, may have trouble understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic relates directly to SETI’s reason for existence.

The environmentalist’s dilemma is a slowing of the economy coinciding with a drop in the price of oil. For people concerned about the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by human activity, a slowdown of the economy is good news.

Almost exactly ten years ago, the South Eastman Transition Initiative came into existence. The Initiative was then and is now a loose grouping of individuals who have coalesced around the notion that our lifestyle, focused on consumption, was and is unsustainable.

A few weeks ago, in this blog, I was imagining a revolution here in Manitoba. Don’t worry, I was thinking of a quiet revolution, a food revolution… one in which our own province becomes the major source of what goes into our mouths and bellies.

So, this is a Re-thinking Lifestyles blog post, yes? Why, then, am I writing about soil and farming?

Mother Nature does a fantastic job of keeping our earth covered in green plants. She might be the expert to consult on growing green plants – her methods differ substantially from ours but maybe we could mimic them more closely than we do.

I wrote previously in this blog of how the enticement of making sauerkraut out of squash led me to turn cook books on their heads. All thanks to largely unsung heroes, bacteria.

Recently, Thomas Daigle, technology reporter with the CBC suggested that the internet is using 11% of the total electrical energy used by humans and this percentage is increasing.