Garbage Warrior

http://www.garbagewarrior.com/index.php

"The epic story of radical Earthship eco architect Michael Reynolds, and his fight to build off-the-grid self-sufficient communities."

(Thanks, Brett)

Sightsavers

http://www.sightsavers.org/default.asp

Sightsavers works to combat blindness in developing countries, restoring sight through specialist treatment and eye care. They also support people who are irreversibly blind by providing education, counselling and training.

WorldChanging.org

http://www.worldchanging.com/

"Worldchanging is a solutions-based online magazine that works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it's here. We only need to put the pieces together."

(Thanks, Brett)

Slow Down

http://www.metafilter.com/66879/Slow-Down

Slow Food (UK)

http://www.slowfood.org.uk

"The Slow Food movement began in 1986 when an Italian journalist visited Rome and saw a brand new branch of McDonalds at the foot of the Spanish Steps.

"Carlo Petrini was horrified. To him, it seemed that a global takeover of industrialised, standardised fast food was well on the way - and it could be the beginning of the end for the huge variety of good, traditional, regional Italian food. He decided that it was necessary to set up a 'slow food' movement to counteract the potential for 'fast food' world domination.

"Eco-gastronomy: Between the 1980s and now, Slow Food has become an international organisation of members who not only care about retaining our diverse heritage of regional food and drink, and protecting it from unthinking globalisation, but are increasingly aware of the associated environmental issues.

"Read the Slow Food Manifesto - it sums it all up better than I can!

"What does Slow Food actually do?

· The local branch, or Convivium is the grassroots heart of Slow Food. It organises a variety of events such as tastings, dinners with a particular theme, and visits to places of food and drink interest. Education is an important purpose for a convivium - whether it be organising initiatives in schools, such as the school gardens project, or educating people about real food with taste! The convivium collects information about regional food and drink, whether it be good shops or restaurants, or food and drink products under threat - and passes on this information to Slow Food members worldwide. Conviviality and enjoying yourself are essential features of Slow Food membership! List of UK convivia here.

"· Members receive receive 'Snail Mail', the Slow Food UK quarterly newsletter, convivium newsletters and information about forthcoming Slow Food events and activities, as well as the 'Slow Food Companion' - a fascinating summary of everything that the Slow Food movement does, and other international publications. (The Slow Food Companion can be downloaded from here.)

"· Collectively Slow Food has initiatives ('the Ark of Taste' and the 'Presidia') designed to identify, preserve and protect threatened food and drink products, rare breeds or species. Examples of UK presidia include artisan Cheddar cheese hand-made in Somerset from unpasteurised milk, Three Counties Perry, and Old Gloucester Beef. More about Slow Food's biodiversity programmes.

"· Slow Food continues to develop taste education programmes for children and adults, including the new University of Gastronomic Sciences, established in Italy in 2003. It also campaigns to sustain quality agriculture and to maintain the biodiversity of our food supply. It does not restrict itself to the developed nations - Slow Food is active in promoting projects to sustain food production in the world's poorer countries."

Slow Cycling

http://www.upstateturtles.com/

http://www.slowfoodvancouver.com/index.php/BikeBlossoms/

http://www.slowfoodcyclesunday.com/

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

(Thanks, Dougald)

Slow Poetry

From another blog run by Austin poet Dale Smith, in which he has started to talk about Slow Poetry (SloPo), a way of thinking about poetry that claims affiliation with the Slow City and Slow Foods movements ...

[external blog post starts here]

http://possumego.blogspot.com/

“I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass,” wrote Whitman in Leaves of Grass. Joseph Harrington observed in comments to my last post how Slow Poetry (SloPo), as I described it, focused primarily on production. But consumption, he points out, is critical too.

Consuming less would provide more room to actually apprehend the valuable works we do read. Whitman’s reverence for loafing, too, is critical to the SloPo movement. Loafing lets us recharge the imagination. We are conditioned to produce, consume, obey. But loafing leads us to evaluate the limits of our own resources and shows us quietly how to expand our appetites through emergent forms. We can rediscover value in the domestic or in landscapes.

Michel de Certeau’s marvelous work, The Practice of Everyday Life, also helps us see how walking in one’s neighborhood can be a radical act. Walking, loafing, drifting afar from the duties of system all aid in the composition of one’s inner life. The poem merely interfaces with us, to help us see a world as words, within their material limits, make it known. J. B. Jackson once noted that one necessity shared by human cultures is a desire to “narrow the distance between ourselves and reality.” Loafing is one means to this and remains one of the key tenets to the open source platform hereby known as SloPo.

Everyone is invited to contribute thoughts and arguments on SloPo at your leisure. Although the official news sources are treating high oil prices as a lifestyle story (how have high gas prices changed the way you commute to work?), the Internet is abuzz with fears of a “Greater Depression.” It is possible we are all going to have to relearn how to live here now without many of the things we are used to having. While I’m not interested in apocalypse—and I don’t think that’s what’s coming—something quite extraordinary is, however, waiting just outside the door. SloPo can help us keep it together. It can prepare us mentally and spiritually for ways to reorganize social spaces and to address the needs of more immediate communities of people who will demand new methods of apprehension when Wal-Mart disappears for good.

If the world slows down as the financial tsunami we are witnessing now slams into our behemoth global systems, how will our work as poets continue? And if big Cap manages to avert another global crisis, proving Marx wrong yet again, how prepared can we be to address that continuation of reality?

posted by Dale
http://possumego.blogspot.com/

[external blog post ends here]

La Revue du M.A.U.S.S.

http://www.revuedumauss.com.fr/Pages/ABOUT.html

"La Revue du M.A.U.S.S. was launched in 1981 by a handful of French academics working in sociology, economics or anthropology. They resented the path which was being imposed to social sciences at the time, notably their submission to an omnipotent economic model. They disagreed with an exclusively instrumental vision of democracy and social relationships.

"The reference to Marcel Mauss and the critics of utilitarianism which fired the École Sociologique in the wake of Émile Durkheim enabled to muster critical energies in a sufficiently clear and explicit manner. Thus, a non-profit organization was created which proceeded at once to publish a review. Since its early and very modest origins, this review was meant as a link and discussion tool, able to withstand the theoretical stakes of the project, but also to welcome non-academics, militants and every person eager to think away from chapel constraints and academic gibbering.

"From a fairly amateurish quarterly, Le Bulletin du MAUSS (1982-1988) became La Revue du MAUSS trimestrielle after La Découverte publishing house took over its production process in 1988, and, since 1993, has turned into La Revue du MAUSS semestrielle, a twice-yearly publication

"As years went by, the initial handful of followers turned into a wider audience, attracting readers and writers alike from other countries. From its initial critical posture, La Revue du MAUSS contributed to the creation of a wide panel of theories and papers all linked by what came to be known as the gift paradigm. This helped set La Revue du MAUSS as the organ of a new current of thought among social sciences and political philosophy."

(Thanks, Jacques)

The Gift Economy

http://www.gift-economy.com/

"The institutions and social structures that are common in society seem to be based on domination, competition, and egotism, not on nurturing. The shift in perspective offered here is to re view everything in terms of nurturing, or to phrase it another way, in terms of gift giving. The thread of gift giving and receiving begins in every life in the unilateral need satisfaction provided by mothers. As time goes on in the individual life and in the existence of institutions and social structures, this thread is altered, turned back upon itself, moved to different levels, used for domination, used metaphorically. The thesis here is that almost everything from nature to culture can be viewed as gift-giving in some form."

Inclusive Solutions

http://www.inclusive-solutions.com/

"Inclusive Solutions makes available cutting edge practical strategies and ideas for developing effective inclusion in local mainstream classrooms, schools, colleges and communities. We use our international links to learn about new ideas and we adapt them to the UK context. We work with anyone who wants to bring about the real systems changes that are necessary to move towards a truly inclusive society."

Borderlands (Australia)

http://www.borderlands.org.au/

Borderlands Cooperative is a non-profit organisation involved in community, social and international development, ecological sustainability and social justice. Amongst other things, we provide consultancy to service providers, government and community organisations in the form of program, service and organisational evaluation, social impact research and needs analysis.
Building in sustainability measures and assessment has been a central feature of our social impact research and evaluation of projects and programs. Our work is research-based and favours participatory approaches to research and evaluation. We have an extensive library of current journals, government policy and research literature as well as membership in the Association of Researchers in Voluntary and Community Work (ARVAC – UK), Volunteering Victoria, and Action Research Issues Association, ALARPM, and our consultants have individual membership in several other professional associations and other networks.

From Downing Street ...

http://www.number10.gov.uk/output/Page15926.asp
10 July 2008

We received a petition asking:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to stop the involvement of arms company Lockheed Martin in the 2011 Census for England and Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, because this company's history of working in American military intelligence will undermine public confidence in the Census process."

Details of Petition:

"With more sensitive information being collected in the next Census in 2011, do we really want data about everyone in the UK being collected by a foreign arms company? Lockheed Martin is one of the shortlisted contractors to provide data capture and storage services for the 2011 Census, but the majority of its business is with the American Department of Defense and other US government agencies. They produce missiles, naval systems and land mines, as well as providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnnaissance services. Most worrying is their claim to deliver 'integrated threat information' to the US military by combining and analysing a widde range of intelligence information from around the world. With Lockheed Martin involved, people in the UK will not believe that their Census submissions will be safe from being incorporated into these systems, and this is likely to harm the reliability of the 2011 Census. We at Census Alert urge you to sign the petition because we believe that this kind of company should not be gathering sensitive data on every member of our population."

Read the Government's response

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is responsible for conducting the census in England and Wales and owns all of the data collected. ONS is seeking the support of external suppliers because the 10-year cycle for the census, the short processing timetable and extensive data systems required mean that outsourcing offers efficiencies and value for money. Censuses in Scotland and Northern Ireland are devolved matters.

ONS is nearing the end of a procurement exercise for census processing and two companies, Lockheed Martin UK and T-Systems remain in contention for award of the printing, data capture and processing contract to support the 2011 Census. Under either proposal all processing will take place in the UK and strict controls will be in place to protect confidentiality.
The confidentiality of personal census information is a top priority and personal census data will not be shared with any other state or nation. The UK Statistics and Registration Services Act makes disclosure of such personal data a criminal offence. All staff working with census data, including all subcontractor staff, sign a confidentiality declaration to confirm their understanding of and obligations to data confidentiality and undertaking to comply with legislation.
ONS is carrying out a fully compliant procurement in accordance with the requirements of European law and the European Union Procurement Directives, which have been incorporated into English law. The foundations of the rules are fairness and transparency. Any organisation with the correct technical capability, financial stability and experience therefore has the opportunity to compete openly for Government business throughout the European Union without discrimination. Lockheed Martin has significant experience of managing contracts for censuses in the UK and internationally. It held the contract for data capture and processing for the 2001 UK census, the 2010 US census, and the 2006 Canadian census.

Philosophical Action Figures

Philosophical Powers:

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~iav202/powers/powers.html

Theory.org.uk

http://www.theory.org.uk/action.htm

Modern Man Philosopher Action Figures

http://uberdionysus.livejournal.com/33048.html

Peaceful Schools International

Ah, the serendipities of synchronicitous happenstance :)

http://peacefulschoolsinternational.org/

Peaceful Schools International, a Canadian charitable organization, was established in 2001 by Hetty van Gurp, an internationally recognized educator and author. A network of dedicated, locally-based Regional Coordinators provides support to schools that have declared a commitment to creating and maintaining a culture of peace.