Creating social change
100 Dreams for a Powerdown world
In his blog today, Chris Guillebeau challenges his readers to list 100 dreams: “a completely unedited list of anything you might want to do or have more of in life. It’s like a bucket list, but most people don’t get…
Divesment from fossil fuels: tips for activists
The process of divesting from fossil fuels follows a certain timeline. (What is Divestment from Fossil Fuels? It’s basically un-investing from oil, gas and coal.) And where an organization is on this timeline determines the type of action, talking points, and answers…
What is Divestment from fossil fuels?
Divestment is the opposite of investment: you can think of it like “uninvesting.” To divest from fossil fuels means to sell all the oil and gas company stocks in your investment portfolio (or your university’s portfolio, or your faith community’s…
Are you Ready for Rain?
I’ve been thinking about rain a lot lately, especially since we have 151 adobe bricks laid out right now, supposedly drying in the sun. We’ve had to do tarp-foraging, and monitor hourly weather forecasts, and get together a Tarping Team…
A quick introduction to Permaculture
Permaculture is a design system which can help us make more appropriate choices. Permaculture was conceived of in the 1970s by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, and its ideas have now spread around the world. Its name comes from the idea…
Divest and Reinvest
What is “divestment”? You can think of it like “un-investment.” Or more significantly, investing your money in something else. In this case, we’re talking about divestment from fossil fuels. Coupled with reinvestment in clean energy and post-carbon infrastructure.
What would you do with $20 million?
What if you were given $20 million dollars? What would you do with it? And at the same time, you were told you had only 10 years left to live? That was the writing assignment handed to my daughter’s high-school…
How to be an activist based on Good Science
Within activism (particularly the GMO debate) it is common to hear one side dissing the other with claims of “bad science.”The truth is, there are “good science” studies on both sides of the GMO argument. Meanwhile, we activists have…
Featured on the RootSimple podcast
Catch the conversation between me (Joanne P) and Erik Knutzen of RootSimple as we talk about the GMO-Free Zone in L.A., what it means, the backstory, and what happened in December. (I don’t talk about future strategy, intentionally, since I…
What happened to the GMO-Free Zone?
Not everything we do comes out successful. Sometimes we have some rather spectacular failures. Hopefully, we learn from them, we dust ourselves off, and we continue on. When you’re fighting GMOs, you know that at some point you’ll encounter opposition.…