LINDSAY CURREN

As tempting as it is to take a break from your life to join the activities at an Occupy Wall Street encampment, this isn't necessarily possible for everyone. But that doesn't mean you don't get to enjoy the opportunity to make a statement, flout mainstream culture, and help influence others toward the good. In fact all you need to achieve all three is to hang your tidy whities on the line. That's right, later this week — Thursday, April 19 — is National Hanging Out Day, an annual day of laundry activism to help raise awareness about just how much energy (predominately fueled by coal) goes in to our home appliances, notably, our clothes dryers.

Like bread making, about which I wrote a few weeks ago in the beginning of my Yes, You Can...series, fermentation can easily scare the living daylights out of you. Not only does it operate on the presumption that you're working with the bacterial world (a concept modern people are taught to fear like the Plague itself) but it also requires that element that we're taught to believe is in ever short supply: Time. In the spirit of not only bucking those fake obstacles, but embracing them with decided exuberance, author Sandor Ellix Katz has created a little masterpiece with his book Wild Fermentation, The Flavor, Nutrition and Craft of Live-Culture Foods.

These days, looking to future resilience often means looking backward, to when families and communities did more things themselves. Prepping old school style is the key to peak oil not hitting quite so hard in your own life. That's why vegetable gardening needs to become a four-season activity for resilience-minded preppers.

Fresh, crusty, tasty, perfect artisan bread may seem like an exotic offering that's beyond the scope of the average person. Let me emphasize that that is simply not true.

Va. Governor Bob. McDonnell is on a GOP VP short list and recently threw his endorsement to candidate Mitt "corporations are people, my friend" Romney. But in an era of energy decline it's worth learning how heavily Big Coal funds McDonnell, who calls himself a "friend of coal," and how uncommitted he is to clean energy.

And, as we're always saying here at Transition Voice, however compelling evidence may be in a white paper, chart, graph, or long lecture, if it doesn't succeed in communicating the problem and possible solutions to the problem in a way that engages people, it can end up being of little use except in obscure research or as a footnote somewhere. That's why we were excited to review a new documentary out of the UK, The Crisis of Civilization, by filmmaker Dean Puckett. In the trailer it looked like the newest, most accessible peak oil film since The End of Suburbia. And once we watched the film, we weren't disappointed.

With so many books on our shelves we have a trove of tips and techniques to draw on far into the future as we re-skill our way forward. And, providing we make the preservation of the Internet a priority, our Web hubs will allow us to exchange information and ideas to help us adapt in place most delightfully.

Released in 2011, with an introduction that references this year's dramatic Tahrir Square and Wisconsin protests, Starhawk appears to have anticipated the broad and unabashed presence of public group processing endeavors in the social movements shaking up the "world order" today.

Old school letterpress printers Hatch Show Print of Nashville, Tennessee have been in continuous business since 1879. They do everything by hand from carving plates to setting type to inking and then hand cranking their print rollers. Their business model offers an excellent example of the kinds of jobs of the future communities need in addition that go beyond food production and farming.

The mainstream media is eager to declare the Occupy movement dead after police-enforced bust ups and in light of the coming winter. Clearly the media is out-of-touch with just how huge the movement is online. But plenty of articles, actions, and idea-memes are circulating, suggesting that the winter will not be one of discontent, but of renewed intent. To that end, we offer 10 ways to #OccupyWinter productively, like seeds planted for a coming spring.