AMANDA KOVATTANA

Derek's book is a far cry from anything so conventional. He aims to inspire with his ideas, ideas that may well earn his book a place in tiny house history. What he ends up doing is reconstructing the mind into accepting what constitutes shelter. (Also "Build Your Own House")

Illuminating and infuriating. I had no idea I could blame so much on Freud. This four part BBC series tells the story of how American consumerism was created as well as the fear of communism and how the human potential movement was co-opted into focus groups that, later, rendered politicians, especially liberal politicians, impotent while creating a citizenry catered to by boutique politics.

Greer is at his most stimulating when he offers ways of rethinking our ideology and shifting towards more adaptive thinking. I particularly liked his insight on the tragic hero vs. the comedic hero. One dies for ideology while the other manages to come through somehow largely through adaptive survival.

While walking the boardwalk at Pattaya, that weekend, I noticed a sign posted in a police sentry box, urging people not to throw garbage or cigarette butts on the beach. The sign was in Thai and English and the words "Keep it clean for the King," caught my eye. Underneath in smaller type was added "and safe for children and wildlife". Suddenly it came to me. The King was not coming to the beach anytime soon. He was a symbol representing the commons. He supported the interests of the people so the people returned the favor and called themselves supporters of the King because he supported them. Didn't anybody get it? Did the West even have a symbol of the commons?

For me a boat easily fit into my collection of human powered vehicles, yet was something new that I hadn't tried before as an adult. And here it was entering my consciousness as a post-collapse survival tool, the context by which I justified my investments of time and money. But was a boat a survival tool or an expensive new toy? It was not as though I could commute in a boat as I would on a bicycle.

A lively film promoting activism via video that is in itself a sophisticated example of the medium. With a personal narrative from author/activist Jon Cooksey, this is a rapid fire account of five problems that are bringing the human race to the brink of disaster due to ecological deterioration of the planet.

Supposedly one of the reasons that the world tolerates Americans, and indeed one of the reasons we tolerate ourselves, is because we have a reputation for innovation. As an innovator myself I can vouch for this.

Bodging describes the act of creating things from a mish mash of available materials in a makeshift workshop. Derived from the term to bodge which specifically refers to the turning of tree branches into chair legs using a foot operated lathe. Such free materials as a bodger might use, today, can be found in the form of recyclables left on the curb and the rapidly disappearing "big trash" day.

This new year brought another new feeling for me too, of having come to the end of a long string of questions. I'd spent so many years in hot pursuit of answers that I was suddenly at a standstill looking around wondering where I was headed or had I, in fact, arrived?

The culture shock I felt upon my return from Thailand was so severe I was in a stupor for a month not knowing how to direct my life. I did not feel safe sitting in a house with a mortgage. I did not feel safe in America itself. I saw a nation of people carrying massive amounts of credit card debt and few practical skills. They had less of a safety net than a Thai farmer. ... Just as the tide going out reveals an awesome array of flora and fauna living in hidden tide pools, so too did the economic crisis reveal an amazing array of creatures I had no idea existed.