Japanese families are getting smaller while the ranks of the aged are growing. A co-operative has stepped into this vacuum, connecting thousands of elders who have something to give and something to receive.
It turns out there is a reason humans live decades after our reproductive years end, a reason obscured by reference to "the golden years" and endless products designed to keep us young. The truth is we need our elders to be elders.
It's not coincidental that throughout history the most violently despotic and warlike societies have been those in which violence, or the threat of violence, is used to maintain domination of parent over child and man over woman.
Yet this is a sort of knowledge that
generations before us have already held, a way of appreciating
the world that we might share without trauma, without hard
lessons, if we but remember how our ancestors used to
live.
Americans are far more affluent, on average,
than we were in the 1960s, but no happier. What do research
data tell us is the real source of joy and
contentment?
a story of a vegetarian who learned how to hunt
on his land. He developed his own personal ecology, which
included eating locally and responsible
hunting.
More than a hundred years after it helped overthrow the Queen of Hawaii, the Congregational Church musters the courage to face its past and apologized for the church's role in “the unprovoked invasion of the Hawaiian nation.”
The Compassionate Listening Project is a reconciliation effort based on the ideas of Gene Knudsen Hoffman, a Quaker peacemaker. Participants are trained to listen respectfully to all sides of the conflict, with a goal to build the international constituency for Mideast peace while offering a practical tool for conflict resolution.
garden of simplicity, by Duane Elgin.
Simplicity is the new mantra for the overworked, over-stressed,
and over-cluttered, and for those who want to lighten their
impact on the Earth. The author of the classic book on
voluntary simplicity says the ways to simplicity are
many.
combining some old-fashioned animal husbandry
with new, low-tech facility design and sophisticated ideas
about the relationships between livestock and the
land.