Happy Friday! This week on The Sunny Way:

• Tuesday I wrote about a powerful realization—that humans and our activities are not separate from nature.
• Wednesday, Victoria wrote about her garden, and seeing how it’s as much about her efforts as the beauty of nature itself.
• Thursday, we let you know about the NY Loves Mountains festival happening this weekend.

Today I’d like to share with you this incredible video of the Milky Way rising in the sky. Amazing to stop and contemplate the wonders swirling all around us, isn’t it? Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Read more...

image by Soil-Science.info

How many of us city dwellers ever think about where our power comes from? Or the consequences of our energy consumption? NY Loves Mountains is on a mission to change that, to connect the dots between the people in the Five Boroughs and where the energy we use every day comes from—largely the mountains of Appalachia, and the filthy, outdated process of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining.

The NY Loves Mountains Festival, organized by The Sunny Way’s own Sarah Moon and her partner Stephanie Pistello, is happening this weekend. Here’s a run down of the events—you can read more about them at the NY Loves Mountains site.

• First up is a reading of the play Light Comes, written and directed by Sarah, which loops through history and geography to explore the relationships between energy and culture. I saw an earlier version of this play last year and was really inspired by it. I can’t wait to see where she’s taken it now! The reading will take place Friday night (tomorrow) at 8 pm, at the Philip Coltoff Center, 219 Sullivan Street, with a reception to follow. If you come, please find me and Rich and Victoria and say hi.
• Saturday there will be a Fossil Fools Demonstration and Scavenger Hunt starting at the south end of Union Square. Four stations will ask questions and provide information about why and how we can and must get off of fossil fuels. I also hear there will be bike-powered smoothies available.
• Sunday wraps things up with a concert featuring Ben Sollee, Silas House, and Demolition String Band @ The Bell House, 149 7th St., Gowanus, Brooklyn. Tickets are $17 and available here.

Read more...

image by woodleywonderworks

Summer is coming up—my favorite time of year when gardening takes priority over being indoors. This past spring, I really wanted to start my seeds indoors early, but I was so busy with graduate classes, so I pushed aside seed planting. Gratefully though, I did do a seed germination test with my leftover seeds from years past. Actually, what pushed me to test my old seeds was that I had committed to write about it for this site. It’s interesting how that works, but since I shared my thoughts with other contributors here—Megan, Uli, Sarah, Stella and Rich—I was bound to deliver on it. In the future, I would like to cultivate my interests to a greater extent to where my motivation is large enough to propel me forward, and sharing with others enriches it, reinforces it, but is not dependent upon it.

After the germination tests, I did cull a lot of old seed.  I am really enjoying the clarity and sureness of knowing that all the seeds in my seed storage box are viable. That may sound silly, but it’s a bonus to see the link between effort and results, because in life, it’s not always so clear. For the first time, this spring I looked out at my garden, and realized that its beauty is not only because of the intrinsic beauty that is nature, but also a result of the effort and care of my parents and me. I was moved more by the realization that the garden shows the efforts we have invested in making it beautiful than everything that needs doing.

Read more...

image by Jeff Kubina

Going through a tunnel not too long ago I had an odd, beautiful experience. I realized that the tunnel I was in, the mountain through which it carved, the dynamite that blasted it, and the person who had the idea to go through the mountain instead of around it, were all flowerings of the same thing. Spirit, the universe, nature, God, pick your term—whatever you call it, the same force that pushed those peaks hundreds of feet up into the sky also led to my being there at that moment, in a car going 60 miles an hour through the mountain’s heart.

In that moment, I felt it in my bones—we are not separate from nature. We were created by its workings, and as we express our desire to grow and evolve and create the new, we express nature’s own desire to do the same.

Read more...

This week was a juicy one!

• Monday and Tuesday we explored what it means to be Bright Green from the inside out.
• Wednesday, we looked into the Transition movement, and saw both the power and the unanswered questions in it.
• Thursday, we discussed how Transition might fit into Bright Green overall, and how different factions of environmentalism might organize our activities around a common set of values. (More on this next week!)

Today I’d like to share with you a video I saw on Rob Hopkins’s website, Transition Culture. “The Powerdown Show” is a series of ten 20 minute episodes, each going into a different aspect of the Transition movement. This episode is about the origins,  goals, and motivations of Transition. I found it really thought-provoking and also incredibly well-produced. My favorite part starts around 16:00, when different people involved with Transition each say what it means to them. The varied responses are all heartfelt, and the people are each glowing with inspiration—an incredible thing to see!

One more thing: Transition is having a conference this weekend, and as part of it, they will be streaming In Transition, a movie about the Transition movement, online at 1:45pm London time, which means 8:45am Eastern time in the US. You can watch the stream here.

The Powerdown Show - Transition Towns and Energy Descent Pathways from Rob Carr on Vimeo.

If you’re reading in email or RSS and can’t see this video, click here.

Read more...

image by Neil D.

Continuing from yesterday’s discussion ...

Transition focuses on increasing resilience in communities by creating sustainable, local systems for producing food, generating energy, creating needed products, and transacting business. Life in the “Energy Descent,” as Transition calls it, can be healthier, happier, and more fulfilling than the lives we in the developed world are living now. From the site of founder Rob Hopkins:

“How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march?”

When I first heard about Transition at the 350 Conference, I was with Sarah, who was already very familiar with it. She told me that she’d been contemplating moving to a Transition town, but she felt conflicted. How worthwhile is it, she wondered, to work to make one place resilient, when what needs to change in the world is on a global scale?

Read more...

image by Jeff Kubina

Have you heard about the Transition movement? The New York Times Magazine did a great piece on it a few weeks ago in their Green Issue—here’s their summary of what it’s all about:

“Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.”

The article goes on to say that Transition springs from a quite dystopian vision—Peak Oil and the impossibility of making a full systems switch before it hits the fan—but then takes a Utopian turn, putting new possibilities into the picture. Maybe a low-energy future can be a fantastic place to live! Maybe it’ll be better than what we have now!

Read more...

image by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha

I was thinking about what I wrote yesterday about becoming Bright Green from the inside out, and realized I had more to say! Shocking, right?

First off, it’s not that we have to change ourselves before we change the world. That wouldn’t work very well, would it? It’d be like if the Karate Kid never entered a tournament, just waxed on and waxed off forever. No, training and engagement go on at the same time, each supporting and informing the other. As we open up to a new point of view, we automatically start to engage differently in the world. Meanwhile the experiences we have while engaging with life in new ways cause our ideas and values to shift even more. Internal and external evolve together.

Secondly, reading over yesterday’s post, I was reminded of a point made by the brilliant Daniel Quinn, who wrote the Ishmael books. He says something like, “We can’t base our hopes for the future on human beings suddenly being better than they are right now.”

Read more...

image by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha

We’ve talked a lot about Bright Green thinking on The Sunny Way, but I don’t know if we’ve ever really defined what it is. Here’s how Worldchanging founder Alex Steffan explains it:

“In its simplest form, bright green environmentalism is a belief that sustainable innovation is the best path to lasting prosperity, and that any vision of sustainability which does not offer prosperity and well-being will not succeed. In short, it’s the belief that for the future to be green, it must also be bright. Bright green environmentalism is a call to use innovation, design, urban revitalization and entrepreneurial zeal to transform the systems that support our lives.”

As I’ve followed and participated in the Bright Green movement, I’ve noticed that it’s very focused on material changes—designing better, building better, living better. Worldchanging and other Bright Green resources do a great job describing what a Bright Green society might look like, but I wonder, what does it mean for a person—with thoughts and emotions and decisions to make—to be Bright Green? How does a Bright Green person see and operate in the world?

Read more...

This week on The Sunny Way we looked into our core concept—how changing ourselves is a vital component of changing the world—from a variety of perspectives:

• Monday, I wrote about my experiments with optimum nutrition and exercise and how the walls of what-I-thought-I-knew are crumbling.
• Tuesday, Esther updated us on the project she’s involved with to build bridges between Israeil and Palestinian women—powerful stuff!
• Wednesday, I described how my brain exploded, in a good way, from reading Naomi Wolf’s Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.
• Thursday, I wrote about and signed up for the Truth Squad’s its mission to get radical climate awareness on the agenda in newspapers, magazines, and blogs around the country. We also launched our email subscription feature!
• Today, one of my favorite blogs, Tiny Choices, ran a survey I filled out!

Today’s post is all about the Waxman-Markey Bill currently swirling around Capitol Hill. It will create a cap-and-trade system aimed at dramatically reducing carbon emissions over the next few decades. What is cap-and-trade? Good question, and Hank Green from Eco-Geek (a remarkably level-headed green technology blog) has created this short video to answer it.

Once you’ve got the basics from this video, check out some of the more in-depth links here. And contact your Congressperson to let them know that you want a strong bill that doesn’t have loopholes or giveaways for big energy. We need real change, not just another law that armies of lawyers can find a way to weasel out of!

Read more...

Many people have asked for this feature, and now we’ve added it—you can subscribe to The Sunny Way via email now! When you sign up, you’ll start receiving our postings in your mailbox every day.

Some things to keep in mind:

• We will never sell or even lend or even think about selling or lending your email address to anyone.
• You can unsubscribe anytime you want with just a click.

Just type your email address in the box to the right—> and you’re in!

image by SimonDoggett

Since reading Naomi Wolf’s most awesome book Give Me Liberty and attending the 350 Conference Saturday before last, I’ve been feeling the urge to get even more deeply involved with the climate change movement and researching different ways to do that. (More on some of the cool stuff I’ve found next week.)

Looking at my strengths and at what needs to be done, I’m pulled toward finding more opportunities and outlets to share ideas and inspiration via writing. Spirited exchange of ideas is a huge component of democracy, and Wolf spends several chapters of Give Me Liberty on the importance of debate in creating a well-informed and participatory citizenry. She suggests that we write Op-Ed pieces, Letters to the Editor, and blog posts to get the message out, and even explains how to go about it.

One of my favorite quotes comes from Antoine de St. Exupéry’s The Little Prince, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” Communicating is what I do best; maybe I can help create a yearning for a clean and meaningful future.

Read more...

I first read Naomi Wolf in college, when The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women came out. This book helped me so much—I can’t say it got me over all my body/appearance-related issues, but it at least gave me a more objective way to look at them.

Reading The Beauty Myth, I felt both validated and liberated. It was obvious that Wolf really understood the psychological and historical forces at play every time I, and every other woman about my age, looked into the mirror. I appreciated both the clarity of her thought and the passion of her writing.

I feel the same after reading her latest book, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries, in which she turns her rigorous intellect and her fiery opinions to the subject of democracy itself. The result is both a blistering critique of where our country is, and an inspiring vision for how to get it to where we know it can and should be.

Read more...

This is a guest post by Esther Kassovicz, updating us on the progress of her project to build bridges between Israeli and Palestinian women, which she first told us about a few months ago in an 11 Questions survey. Fill out the survey and let us know what you are up to! We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

We’ve had by now 2 monthly joint meetings, and I feel that the trust between us is building slowly but surely. Our facilitators are very experienced and our various activities have enabled us to discover and rediscover again that each of us, in spite of surrounding opposition and cynicism about the future of such gatherings, want to give this a real chance.

Read more...

image by moria

At the beginning of the year, I made a commitment to improve my physical well-being and strength through nutrition and exercise.

My goals were simple: I wanted to see how it felt to take excellent care of my body, and I wanted to find out what can emerge from going beyond what I thought I could do. How would eating super-nutritiously and pushing myself with exercise transform me? And can doing something I’ve never done before in one area of life bring about new possibilities in others?

Four and a half months in, I’m learning a ton through these changes.

Read more...