William Powers, Author of New Slow City

Author, Speaker, Professor, Activist

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New World Library
(November 11, 2014)
272 pages
$15.95
ISBN: 978-1608682393

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Recent Posts

  • An Alarming Trend in Eco-Crimes
  • The importance of insecurity: a key to living with presence
  • Law of Detachment
  • Mindful, meditative walking
  • Slow Movement on the Rise!

Archives

December Thoughts on Gratitude

December 13, 2010 by William Powers Leave a Comment

On my Facebook page, I asked you to share “one thing for which you’re grateful.” I’m grateful for such a positive outflow of responses. They illuminated this rainy day. As promised, I randomly picked one out and that person–Jane Holbrook of Beaufort, North Carolina– has won a signed copy of Twelve by Twelve!

One woman writes: “I’m grateful to still be alive to watch my grandson grow up! I clinically died giving birth to my daughter 27 years ago. I am awed and amazed to still be here!” What a beautiful story.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, carbon footprint, environment, global warming, gratitude, permaculture, small house, sustainability, tiny house, voluntary simplicity

Kids Deconstruct Super Bowl Commercials in School

August 30, 2010 by William Powers 1 Comment

        

           In 1996, while teaching at Santa Fe Indian School, my Native American students  told me their story of Jesus: Jesus, they told me, continues to fight an ongoing battle with Murosuyo, a Native American god. They duke it out in the sky and on the ground. The stakes are the fate of the earth. Just as Jesus seems to deliver the final death blow, Murosuyo tackles him in the heavens, and they fall together through the clouds and into a lake, and so it continues. I found it fascinating that their culture and environment is still hanging on today through Murosuyo’s efforts. My teaching became an exchange of ideas.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, kids, media, new mexico, organic farming, permaculture, small houses, super bowl, twelve by twelve, william powers

Stan Crawford’s Garlic Farm (II): Stay “maladjusted to empire”

August 11, 2010 by William Powers 3 Comments

Stan writes in A Garlic Testament about “the pound weight of the real,” the actual wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic at a farmers market. I’d weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my wage and Stan and Rose Mary’s farm expenses. They were constantly “snatching from the cash flow,” as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity. Yet that’s exactly what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area — I shear your sheep, you midwife for me — as well as a traditional communal relationship over irrigation that centered around maintaining tiny dirt canals called acequias. This wasn’t just pragmatism; I sensed a real passion and spirit that comes from subsistence. I saw it again all over the Global South, where living along the contours of enough, without much surplus, keeps you on your entrepreneurial toes and linked to others through reciprocity.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, A Garlic Testament, acequias, organic farming, permaculture, Stan Crawford, The Simple Living Network, twelve by twelve, william powers

Beyond the Russian Grain Ban—Stan Crawford’s Garlic Farm (Part I)

August 6, 2010 by William Powers 2 Comments

Is there a better way?

Russia, crippled by intense drought that has withered millions of acres of Russian wheat, moved today to ban exports of its grain. This is a fifth of the world’s market, and comes at a time when grain prices are already up 90%.

This dangerous mix of global warming (this is Russia’s worst heat wave since record-keeping started there 130 years back), the precariousness of chemical-industrial agriculture, and the fickleness of world trade flows got me thinking, once again: Is there a better way?

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, A Garlic Testament, bioregional production, chemical-industrial agriculture, corporate-led globalization, flat world, fossil fuel, global warming, Jack Kerouac, Musak, On the Road, permaculturalists, permaculture, Russia, Russian Grain Ban, Stan Crawford, twelve by twelve, wildcrafters, william powers, world trade

Declare Independence from Stuff

July 15, 2010 by William Powers 4 Comments

The fourth of July has come and gone, but each of us can continue to declare independence every day: independence from stuff.

Can our own personal economy and the Leisure Ethic come together as rebellion? I’m on Cape Cod now, rained in during a family vacation, and my mind is wandering back to my time in Jackie’s tiny 12 foot by 12 foot house. Her lifestyle is a twenty-first-century Boston Tea Party, but she hasn’t thrown just one product overboard; rather, she’s tossed the whole lot of planet-killing junk.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, Boston Tea Party, Cape Cod, farmers market, Leisure Ethic, local economy, organic farming, permaculture, slow food, solar flashlights, The fourth of July, twelve by twelve, william powers

Einstein and the Oil Spill: A Three-Step Response— See, Be, Do

June 28, 2010 by William Powers 1 Comment

After my talk here in Montpelier, Vermont, a discussion broke out on a very big question: What in the world are we to do?

One audience member talked about feeling powerless. Her activism, she said, felt in vain. The life was sucked out of her. Indeed, do-gooding, however outwardly noble, tends to bring the do-gooder into the blight: the same level of consciousness that creates problems like the global ecological crisis. Hence, the archetypes of the burnt-out aid or social worker, the jaded inner city teacher, and the compromised activist. In my new book Twelve by Twelve, the off-grid physician (Dr. Jackie Benton, a pseudonym) suggests that there is something absolutely essential beneath the doing — and it’s the most important part. It has to do with something both Einstein and Jung said in different ways: the world’s problems can’t be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, Einstein, environment, Gandhi, Jung, nature, Oil Spill, permaculture, See be do, sustainability, twelve by twelve, william powers

On the Road in Arizona

June 2, 2010 by William Powers 6 Comments

I’m on the road in Arizona this week, meeting with people to talk about Twelve by Twelve. But like everywhere else, we’re also talking about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The over half-million gallons of oil spewing into the Gulf each day is terrible, but not terribly surprising. After all, we’re also losing several thousand acres of rainforest every day, heating the climate by a fraction of a degree each day, and losing an indigenous culture every two weeks as jungle homelands become cattle clear-cuts.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, Arizona, bioregional production, biosphere, carbon footprint, cattle clear-cuts, composting, environment, Environmental Era, flat world, Gulf of Mexico, indigenous culture, jungle homelands, Oil Spill, organic farming, permaculturalists, permaculture, solar energy, solar panel, sustainability, sustainable community, twelve by twelve, william powers

What’s it like to live in a 12’ by 12’, off-the-grid house?

May 12, 2010 by William Powers 24 Comments

Three years ago, I returned to America after a decade of aid and conservation work in Africa and Latin America. Abroad, I’d seen, starkly, the grave impact the global economic system was having on our environment—Amazon rainforests clear-cut for fast-food cattle, African rivers poisoned by multinational mining—and began asking myself a daunting question: How could humanity transition to gentler, more responsible ways of living by replacing attachment to things with deeper relationships with people, nature, and self?

Fortunately, I stumbled upon someone with some clues: Dr. Jackie Benton (a psudonym, per her request). I met this slight, sixty-year-old physician, she was stroking a honey bee’s wings in front of her twelve-foot by twelve-foot, off-the-grid home in North Carolina.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, bioregional production, Dr. Jackie Benton, environment, flat world, fossil fuel, global warming, globalization, Humanure Handbook, nature, organic farming, permaculturalists, permaculture, small houses, sustainability, twelve by twelve, wildcrafters, william powers

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