Great news! Public Hearing On Allowing Urban Hens in Salem May 26!

Plan to come back from your long Memorial Day weekend by late afternoon on Tuesday, May 26, because that will be the date for the long-awaited, long-overdue

Public Hearing on Urban Hens in Salem!

This is it! Come one, come all! If you have any interest whatsoever in sustainability, local food, home economy, better gardening, and relocalization, please attend --- and, if you live in Salem, plan to testify in support of Chickens in the Yard (CITY).

New books of note at Tea Party Bookshop

Bookseller and STIR member JoAnne notes some interesting new titles at Tea Party:

Gaia's Garden - Revised Edition - A Guide to Home Scale Permaculture - very well done, beautiful illustrations

A Nation of Farmers - Sharon Astyk - written by the same lady who wrote Depletion & Abundance. How growing food, raising chickens, etc. can overthrow industrial agriculture

Presidential Energy Policy - Michael Ruppert - author of Crossing the Rubicon, heard recently on KBOO. More on the end of oil, from a political/economic/military perspective

End of Money & the Future of Civilization - Thomas Greco - more on the economy and how to re-humanize it.

And some more practical books as well, home energy efficiency, cooking green, gardening.

We have seen the future --- and it has pedals

Europe considers car-free future. As must we.

Excellence in Punditry award for week of May 11, 2009

James Howard Kunstler:

We've digested the so-called "stress tests" for now with nary a burp and in a few weeks General Motors will step into the dark cave of bankruptcy. All the ancillary businesses linked to the US car-makers face contraction and annihilation. A couple of things occur to me which have not even entered the national debate on these matters:

1.) the US will still need to manufacture engines and chassis for military vehicles. Do we intend to send out to Mitsubishi for those things in the years ahead?

2.) the US will need rolling stock (i.e. choo-choo cars and engines) for a revived passenger railroad system. Do we intend to buy all that from the quaint peoples of other lands? (While the US workforce instead focuses on updated releases of Grand Theft Auto.)

At the moment, there is tremendous hoopla and jubilation over the start-up of so many "shovel-ready" highway projects around America -- as if what we need most are additional circumferential freeways to enhance the Happy Motoring lifestyle. How insane are we? Is this the only thing we know how to do?