tziteras

Sir, Melanie Reid's article "I don't want to live in a scratchy world of hemp lingerie" made me reach straight for a pen to reply (this email is a transcription of that, you see), with many references to women's impending return to a boring dark age devoid of skiing, exotic food and sleek accessory porn, forced by "eco-purists" to go back to sewing buttons, wearing rags and to the absolute unhappiness of the world that preceded household appliances. I'm sorry for Melanie, but these are in themselves dark times, in which our senses and ability to experience emotion are dulled by the intensity of the world around us, where any exotic meal, place or piece of information is seemingly at our fingertips, or as Daisaku Ikeda, the Japanese Buddhist philosopher puts it, "This imbalance takes the form of a dulling of our natural responsiveness to life and the realities of daily living". And I believe this dulling has in many ways been brought about b

Yesterday I went to the shops, in a desperate last push to get some new curtains, the inner liner white £1-a-metre ones that people put in a drawer when they move in somewhere, and then put back when they move out. And mine were all mouldy... Bleah! Anyway, I stopped in Waterstones for ages and bought 3 books: Clay Shirky's "Here comes everybody" , Noam Chomsky's "What we say goes" (hope I don't get in trouble for linking to a torrent, but they're interviews, and that link will give you the full original audio for them) and Rob Hopkins' Transition Handbook . All these purchases were devoted to my quest for finding a way for the re-use and investment in technology to become a strong part of the Transitionista's vision. I think we've got loads of equipment these days that we can recycle and make use of for a long time, and if we all have generators or solar panels, some of that charge can be spent on the laptop... So no matter how stupidly