Link Loving 09.01.12

• Being digital is an attitude says Greenpeace Chile. Michael Silberman.
• The powerful roots of unarmed environmental protection. Bryan Farrell.
• Welcome to the Networked Non-Profit.
• Unilever unions to strike for 12 days over pensions. Tim Lezard.
• It is time to stop being cynical about corporate money in politics and start being angry. Bill McKibben.
• Why I don’t fly. Isabel Bottoms.
• Workers gave bosses 2 billion hours of unpaid overtime in 2011. Brendan Barber.
• January 25th is to be Peter Tatchell Day. Stephen Gray.

Transition 2.0

I absolutely love the look of this film about the Transition Network.

• It has a dramatic storyline – failure is possible, it shows how tough it can be
• It tells a story of a world that is change – we’re not asking others for permission, people are doing it right now around the world
• Personal stories of transformation – they just work

h/t Rob Hopkins

Link Loving 08.01.12

• Finding meaning at work. Nicholas Ind.
• How doctors die. Fascinating read. Ken Murray. h/t Rich Hawkins.
• How cities are building social capital. Thomas Sander.
• What a social media fail looks like: VW crash and burn. James S.
• Cute cats and the Arab Spring – when social media meets social change. Ethan Zuckerman.
• This makes for fascinating reading – the US right picking itself apart. Red State.
• Delicious to read – Owen Jones takes down Liam Byrne.
• Sometimes I wish I was Tyler Brûlé.

You Can’t Learn That On Google

Wonderful work by the Open Society Foundation. Also fascinating to see the ‘Pride’ frame, most often used by the gay community, be adopted by other oppressed minority groups.

Link Loving 07.01.12

• ASDA finds that for it’s customers, Green Is Normal. Paul Kelly.
• My piece for Campaign Central on values and campaigning.
• Where have all the working class leaders gone? David Skelton.
• Do campaigns predict how a president will govern? Conor Friedersdorf.
• Occupy cinema: can you help make Occupy Wall Street’s collaborative documentary? Jared Keller.
• The Daily Mail prints its third correction on energy prices. Christian Hunt.
• Interactivism: Young People’s Hack Weekend. Apply here.

Learning From Them: Life Reports From The Over-70’s

In October last year, New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks asked readers over the age of 70 to write in with a life report – what had they learned, what they wish they had done differently, what advice they had for young people. He wrote,

Young people are educated in many ways, but they are given relatively little help in understanding how a life develops, how careers and families evolve, what are the common mistakes and the common blessings of modern adulthood. These essays will help them benefit from your experience.

The reports make for fascinating and emotive reading. David identifies a couple of patterns in this follow-up piece, which are:

• Divide your life into chapters
• Beware rumination
• You can’t control other people
• Lean toward risk
• Measure people by their growth rate, not by their talents
• Be aware of the generational bias
• Work within institutions or crafts, not outside them
• People get better at the art of living

It made me think of this beautiful open letter from Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, Naomi Klein and many other older environmentalists as they called for volunteers to step-up and risk arrest in the successful No Keystone XL campaign last year. They wrote,

And one more thing: we don’t want college kids to be the only cannon fodder in this fight. They’ve led the way so far on climate change–10,000 came to DC for the Powershift gathering earlier this spring. They’ve marched this month in West Virginia to protest mountaintop removal; Tim DeChristopher faces sentencing this summer in Utah for his creative protest.  Now it’s time for people who’ve spent their lives pouring carbon into the atmosphere (and whose careers won’t be as damaged by an arrest record) to step up too. Most of us signing this letter are veterans of this work, and we think it’s past time for elders to behave like elders.

h/t Ben Margetts

Link Loving 06.01.12

• Beyond elections: people power. Mark Bittman.
• The state of Georgia decided that these posters would be a good idea to prevent child obesity. Sarah Kliff.
• If you want to, you can follow WWII as it happens. A history student is live-tweeting events as they unfolded 62 years ago.
• How the revolution went viral. Paul Mason.
• Hu Jintao on China losing the culture wars. Isaac Stone Fish.
• How schoolgirls and older women mixing is breaking down age barriers and bringing the local community closer. Homa Khaleeli.

Situations Matter

How often do we really think about the situation a person is in when we’re asking them to change?

An Interview With Matthieu Ricard – The Happiest Man Alive

“You cannot, in the same moment of thought, wish to do something good to someone or harm that person. So those are mutually incompatible like hot and cold water. So the more you will bring benevolence in your mind, at every of those moments there’s no space for hatred. It’s just very simple, but we don’t do that. We do exercise every morning 20 minutes to be fit. We don’t sit for 20 minutes to cultivate compassion. If we want to do so, our mind will change, our brain will change. What we are will change. So those are skills. They need to be, first, identified, then cultivated. What is good to learn chess, well, you have to practice and all that. In the same way, we all have thoughts of altruistic love. Who didn’t have that? But the common goal, we don’t cultivate them.”

Matthieu Ricard

h/t Charlotte Millar

Link Loving 05.01.12

• Where now for the climate justice movement? Guppi Bola, Quincy Saul, Ro Randall, Yash Tandon, Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro.
• Decentralized people power: what OWS can learn from South Africa’s United Democratic Front. Grace Davie.
• The 12 most hopeful trends to build on in 2012. Sarah van Gelder.
• Don’t ask ‘what should I do?’, but rather ‘how can I serve?’ Robin Cangie.
• Stop calling the oil industry ‘Big Oil’. Natalya Sverjensky.
• Even Tory policy wonks know that change comes from the bottom-up. Guido Fawkes.
• Ed Miliband is not the leader of the Opposition. Andrew Simms.