William Powers, Author of Dispatches from the Sweet Life

Author, Speaker, Professor, Activist

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New World Library
(2018-09-04)
304 pages
ISBN: 978-1608685646

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New World Library

Recent Posts

  • The Happiness-Carbon Link: Article in the Solutions Journal
  • A Salon, in the Spirit of Thomas Berry
  • You as Creature: What is biocentrism?
  • The End of Normal?
  • An Alarming Trend in Eco-Crimes

Archives

Getting Away from It All… If That’s Still Possible

January 20, 2011 by William Powers Leave a Comment

Radio Eco-Shock interviewed William Powers this week; it airs on two dozen university and community radio stations this week in the U.S. and Canada. Enjoy!

Listen: William_Powers on Radio Ecoshock

About the interview: There is an emptiness that invites us all to escape. I did, for a while, living for 10 years without electricity in a self-built cabin in Northern Ontario, Canada.

William Powers did. And who is he? Google tells me about an American from Long Island, an international development and aid worker in poorer countries, a man concerned with the extinction of people, languages, and Nature.

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Filed Under: Media Interviews, Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, carbon footprint, corporate-led globalization, environment, Hamlet’s Blackberry, Leisure Ethic, nature, organic farming, permaculturalists, sustainability, The Simple Living Network

“Mommy, I want something ‘wrapped in garbage, please”

December 27, 2010 by William Powers 9 Comments

Now we’re really stuck. The snow keeps dumping on my sister’s family dome on ten glorious white acres in Richmond, VT.

My sister lives in this dome in Richmond, Vermont

Flights are cancelled for the next days, and my parents, myself and everyone else here visiting for the holidays is stuck in Vermont.

And? My nephews—Leo (7), Huck (4), and Roy (2)— certainly don’t mind the blizzard. They dwell blissfully in the now, sledding down the hill toward the freezing creek and playing with legos by the wood burning stove. No TV for distraction here, just old-fashioned play and books and simple toys. Oh, and Another Culture.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, bioregional production, environment, fossil fuel, Leisure Ethic, organic farming, permaculturalists, sustainability, twelve by twelve, william powers

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

Free Range People

November 16, 2010 by William Powers Leave a Comment

After my talk here in Portland last night about Twelve by Twelve (thanks to the 60 of you for coming out!), I had a scrumptious vegan meal with some inspiring free range people.

Free Range People

Free Range People

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, carbon footprint, free range people, sustainability, twelve by twelve, wildcrafters, wildcrafting, william powers

More Joy in your Life through the Leisure Ethic?

November 9, 2010 by William Powers 3 Comments

As I travel the country, a number of people have been asking me: What’s the Leisure Ethic?

Working 24/7… 24 hours a week;  7 months a yearWorking 24/7… 24 hours a week;    7  months a year

While living in a 12’ x 12’, off-grid house, I noticed people reclaiming the right to be idle! They are ratcheting down from overdeveloped to developed, from too much to enough. Dr. Jackie expressed it to me once like this: part of the joy of simplifying one’s material life is that you don’t have to work long hours to buy and maintain a bunch of stuff. This leaves time for open-ended chats —  like the kind I began to have in North Carolina. Doing nothing is a carbon neutral activity!

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, carbon neutral activity, doing and being, holistic balance, Leisure Ethic, living well, off-grid house, simple living, twelve by twelve, william powers

Wisdom = “one mistake after another”

October 20, 2010 by William Powers 3 Comments

I receive so many letters from readers about Twelve by Twelve. Thank you for your feedback! Connecting soul-to-soul with you makes the three years I spent writing it seem entirely worth it. Here’s part of one very thoughtful note I received yesterday. It’s from John Reed, author of the book Elegant Simplicity. He said it was fine to share it. Thanks John.

Wisdom="one mistake after another"

Wisdom="one mistake after another"

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, Elegant Simplicity, flat world, John Reed, self-indulgence, twelve by twelve, william powers

Update from the Road: Minnesota

October 18, 2010 by William Powers Leave a Comment

It has been an amazing trip to the Twin Cities, a welcoming community of people deeply interested in the issues in Twelve by Twelve. I’ve given six talks here in six days: at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute, Common Good Books, the Unitarian Unity Church, a fundraiser for Round Earth Media, and a sustainable development class and the EnviroThursday lecture at Macalester College.

I am learning a lot from each group about other initiatives going on in these communities – and it is in turn inspiring me to see how our fellow Americans are working in their own ways, in a sense fulfilling their own 12×12 visions, as we speak.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, Common Good Books, EnviroThursday, Humphrey Institute International Fellows, Macalester College, mindful consumption, Round Earth Media, Transition Town movement, twelve by twelve, Twin Cities, Unitarian Unity Church, University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute, william powers

Your brain on computers.

October 1, 2010 by William Powers Leave a Comment

This fascinating NY Times article show that scientists claim that “juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. Our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.”

Further: “These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.”

Have you experienced this? Does the distraction of too much technology inflict nicks and cuts on your creative edge and sense of peace? Or do you simply see Facebook, Twitter, texting, calling—and, yes, blogging—as simply another tool that enhances your effectiveness, while still staying focused on what matters?

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 12x12, dopamine squirt, Leisure Ethic, technology overdose, twelve by twelve, william powers

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

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