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Olduvai III: Catacylsm
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A review of three books: Futuresteading, The Good Life and Costa’s World

It’s not often I comment on the constant flow of new books about green lifestyle, growing and wellbeing but three recently released titles had me thinking about the issue of communicating the good news to inspire and motivate people to adopt and adapt ideas for more resilient and low impact living.

As a publisher, it also had me thinking about the way books have changed over the decades. At Melliodora Publishing we focus more on dense content and a little less on style, although over the decades, my personal crusade against the drift to lighter content – in all areas of life! – has been moderated by colleagues proving to me that in a media driven world, presentation is as important as content. These books illustrate one of the directions in publishing that allow books to remain competitive for attention in a very crowded media space.

All three books arrived at Melliodora, partly through the normal promotion channels to reviewers, and partly due to personal and collegiate connection. All three have a colourful style with beautiful images, artful graphics and carefully balanced text and lots of white space, suitable for dipping in and out for ideas, practical guidance and inspiration. All three feature the authors, family and friends in ways that make you feel like you are part of their good life.

The first, Futuresteading; Live Like Tomorrow Matters by Jade Miles from Black Barn Farm in north east Victoria, arrived with the author and her partner Charlie on a visit to Melliodora after a local tree grafting workshop and book promotion event was cancelled (due to Covid of course). Instead Charlie did an impromptu grafting workshop for us Melliodorans, and Jade gave us an inscribed copy of her book…

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Changing Habits For Self-Reliance and Resilience

Changing Habits For Self-Reliance and Resilience

Pandemic Brooding: Brown Tech in New Clothing

Parts of this essay have already been published as ‘Pandemic brooding: can the permaculture movement survive the first severe test of the energy descent future?’ In this longer essay, David Holmgren explores the responses to the pandemic in light of his Future Scenarios work. 

Extract:

I think it is important to see the Brown Tech world as a logical unfolding of energy descent systemic forces breaking down the techno-industrial world, rather than a great battle of benign wisdom over recalcitrant and subversive resistors, or alternatively, an evil plan for world domination that must be resisted at every turn. For an increasingly alienated, perhaps minority of permies, the emergent Brown Tech world is experienced as a mad undemocratic process taking away our rights and freedoms and imposing controls over previously private lives, possibly driven by shadowy elites striving for world domination or worse. This of course leads to association with people of very different values and backgrounds.

Introduction

The welcome signs of spring are all around me at Melliodora and Spring Creek1 after a wet and gloomy winter. With very little passive solar gain, we burnt more wood, and with barely enough photovoltaic power to pump water and power a few other essential functions, we relied on backup from the Victorian grid – still dominated by coal, despite the impressive roll out of wind farms around our region. It was damp enough to remind us of the old days before acceleration of climate change, which has given us more winter sun but less groundwater recharge or fungal decomposition to moderate the fuel loads during the ensuing fire season.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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