Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Improve your energy literacy with stories about pushing motor vehicles, enduring blackouts, and growing $10 tomatoes, and take a tour of history that visits ancient China, industrializing Britain, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the Green Revolution.
No, life has not yet been found on Mars, but imagine waking up to that headline. How would you react? What would this stir for you?
If human ingenuity were a story, one of its main motifs would be transportation. Creatures of land by birth, we have transcended our limitations, reaching across air and water, beyond our own biosphere.
Western environmentalism is surely haunted by the same ghosts as the death-phobic culture out of which it came. When we look at that famous image of the Earth from space, I can’t help thinking that our sense of its fragility is overlaid with projections of an unreconciled fear of our own deaths.
Earlier this week, I was trying to think of ways to talk about the gap between notions about the future we’ve all absorbed from the last three hundred years of fossil-fueled progress, on the one hand, and the ways of thinking about what’s ahead that might actually help us make sense of our predicament and the postpetroleum, post-progress world ahead, on the other.
